


Orbit

by trajectory



Series: Repercussions [5]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Background Relationships, Background Swindle/Blurr, Canon-Typical Violence, Denial, Dsyfunctional Relationships Everywhere, Dubious Consent, Ill-Thought-Out Crushes On Badly Chosen Targets, M/M, Mild Horror, Pre-Canon, Questionable Morality Everywhere, Sexual Interfacing, The Ongoing Combaticon Soap Opera, War Crimes, robot gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 72,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24254722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trajectory/pseuds/trajectory
Summary: Nothing about the first time he’d crossed paths with Onslaught had been particularly unusual, or garnered more from Blast Off than indifference.(Blast Off and the downward descent, in more ways than one.)
Relationships: Blast Off/Onslaught (Transformers)
Series: Repercussions [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1408006
Comments: 71
Kudos: 75





	1. let me tell you a story about war

**Author's Note:**

> As a fair warning, in addition to the above tags, this story is going to contain drinking, strongly implied various kinds of sexual interfacing, Combaticons being terrible people, wetwork, war crimes, genocide, enslavement of alien species, casual space biogtry/xenophobia (Technoism/anti-organic sentiments), torture, forced combination/forced spark bonding, non-consensual mnemosurgery/mind alterations, power imbalance, blackmail, emotional manipulation, dsyfunctional relationships turning into unhealthy relationships, and obsession. And me playing loose and fast with the timeline. 
> 
> It will also make references to Functionism, social inequality, drug usage, untreated alcoholism, forced labor, and organized crime. If any of that isn’t something you want to read about, that’s fine. This is where you can use the back button.

Nothing about the first time he’d crossed paths with Onslaught had been particularly unusual, or garnered more from Blast Off than indifference.

He hadn’t liked him. He hadn’t trusted him.

They had been two mechs meeting on neutral ground for the sake of business back then—cold, impersonal business and nothing more.

Onslaught had sought a sniper, Blast Off had sought an employer, and so when an offer from an unknown number dropped into the inbox of his latest comm frequency when he was between jobs yet again, Blast Off took it. Since the offer had been for long-term employment and not merely an one-off assignment, they had arranged a private meeting in a safehouse. A mech with dark plating and motorcycle kibble had arrived to take him up a long flight of stairs and down a stretch of corridors and corners to an office’s door.

Blast Off had waved them off dismissively, not needing to be herded over the threshold like a newspark. He’d gone inside with his helm high and sat himself down in the chair that had been provided, a desk set between him and his potential new boss, whom he eyed skeptically.

He had known the truck was sizing him up too, visor glowing a bright yellow in the shadow of his helm. Onslaught held himself like a mech certain of his own authority.

The meeting took hours as they hammered out the framework for their association and Onslaught spent all of it with his back straight as if his spinal strut had been surgically replaced with an unyielding iron rod, not slouching, his attention sharp and unwavering, strength solid in his build.

In the end, Blast Off got the concessions he insisted on being written in for any long-term job. And Onslaught had won his employment terms and with them, Blast Off’s contract. Blast Off signed his name on the dotted line at the bottom of the datapad Onslaught briskly slid across the desk to him, Onslaught put his own name under it, and that was that.

He was hired.

The negotiations complete, Onslaught arose from his seat and escorted him back to the door. He pressed a hand to a control panel and it opened with a soft _whoosh_. He turned to Blast Off.

“As I said in my offer, I have no interest in employing anything but mechs who are the best in their area of expertise. I believe we can reach a mutual arrangement where we can be quite useful to each other,” Onslaught told him and held out his hand, palm turned up and open, black fingers uncurled. Blast Off could pick out from where the fluorescent overhead lighting caught on some of them the tiny, barely visible nicks and scuffs lacing the plating that every Cybertronian acquired through the process of daily living, and the outlines of the roughened friction pads on Onslaught’s fingertips, allowing for a better hold on the grip of a gun. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Blast Off looked at it, cold and untrusting.

His visor was flat and his masked face gave away nothing.

He took Onslaught’s hand in a brief shake. “I believe the same, sir.”

**////**

Blast Off couldn’t profess to be terribly impressed by his new teammates in the short time he’d known them so far. And he was decidedly even less impressed by the grimy state of their feet as they walked towards him and right before they could clamber on board his alt mode, Blast Off slammed the cargo hold door shut in Brawl’s face, nearly shearing off the outer jut of his faceplate. Brawl stumbled backwards, arms windmilling, and swore. “What the _frag_ was that for, you stupid boltheaded glitch!”

Blast Off’s speakers dripped disgust.

“Do _not_ refer to me as stupid. Your current state of hygiene is lacking. You want me to permit you to board? Clean yourself up.”

Brawl replied immediately with an explosively foul suggestion that Blast Off go and do something moderately disturbing on top of being highly anatomically inadvisable with a rusted trash compactor, a screwdriver, and a Dead End leaker. Vortex, who had also clearly been wallowing in the same filth that caked the grooves in the tank treads attached to Brawl’s lower legs from the storm that had hit the city earlier that day and left the air thick and humid after it passed over, whistled through his vents jeeringly from behind him. Blast Off mentally marked him down a notch for encouraging the vulgarity.

“If you think crude insults like that will convince me to change my mind, you are sadly mistaken,” Blast Off sneered.

“It’s just a bit of Primus-damned dirt, the frag you gettin’ all prickly over it for!” said Brawl, armor plating flaring out. “Boss said you already agreed to give us a ride there! So, you gotta’ let us on cuz’ we have a mission to do. Right, Vortex?”

“Yup,” said Vortex.

Blast Off didn’t budge. “No.”

Brawl banged a fist on Blast Off’s armor despite the increasingly loud warning rumble emitting from the shuttle’s engines at the action and shouted. “HEY, ONSLAUGHT! The new shuttle is acting up!”

“Acting up? Why, I’ll give you _acting up_ , you lunkheaded—” Blast Off growled.

At the computer terminal on the other side of the hangar with its high vaulted ceiling and a ship bay that Blast Off was docked inside, running through the last of the pre-mission supply checks and double-checks he hadn’t deigned to fill the rest of them in on the details of, Onslaught didn’t look away from the holomap that he had floating up in front of him. Their target’s destination was highlighted in glowing orange and encircled by smaller red squares and circles. “Blast Off’s contract gives him the right to set conditions on who he’ll give a ride to. He’s permitted to determine one of those conditions is a certain level of cleanliness, if he wants, provided it doesn’t interfere with the job. We’re not on a time-sensitive mission.”

“But can’t you just order ‘im to—” Brawl complained.

Blast Off hated the wheedling note in the tank’s rough voice just as much as he hated Vortex encouraging the vulgarity and cut in. “I was hired for my ability as a long range assault specialist, not for the uses of my alt mod. That I am willing to provide transportation for this team is an _additional_ service I can withdraw.”

“There’s a hose right there,” Onslaught called over to them.

And he was correct—one of the hangar’s furnishings was a washing station set by the wall, and that included a set of adjustable nozzles for the high-pressure hoses coiled up on their hooks.

“Fragger,” Brawl spat, flipping Blast Off a rude gesture, and went to use one.

“Mm,” Blast Off hissed air through his vents before going silent.

Vortex didn’t follow right away. He slinked closer and rapped his knuckles on the door to the cargo hold, testing his boundaries. When Blast Off’s field remained unwelcoming and blank, and the door refused to open up even an inch in an obvious message of _yes, that means you too Vortex, you’re not a special exception to my standards, go take a minute to use a hose if you_ _want to board_ only then did Vortex step back and go for the washing station.

**////**

The original metallic bedrock of the site Tarn had been constructed atop of had been long ago buried under layers upon layers of city blocks, fuel depots, storage facilities, foundries, transit mono-lines, roadways, flightlanes, factories, sewer systems, and smelting pits. The Combaticon headquarters was an imposing multiple-story hunk of concrete and reinforced iron built into one of the upper levels of the city. Hemmed in on the front by a stream of air traffic that ebbed and surged endlessly and industrial smog hanging low and heavy in the atmosphere, the complex’s harsh angles blended it in with the juts and cubular shapes of the surrounding structures that were crammed up against it on both sides.

The slot in the city block that the large complex occupied wasn’t on Tarn’s top crust but it was sufficiently close that the sky could be seen through ragged gaps in the platforms crowded together above.

The hangar for flightframes and non-sentient transport ships to dock inside was located on the fifth floor of the complex, and the landing pad for rotaries was spread out across the roof.

On clear days when the sun was a white hot blot shimmering above, one could go out onto the roof and bask for hours in the rippling heat beating down in angry rays on the darkened metal. Machinery purred and thumped away in the depths of the facility.

There were private berthrooms stocked with furnishings and a few kitchens to prepare energon in scattered around in the floors where no visitors were permitted without permission, but none of the Combaticons stayed in them with any regularity, not even Onslaught. They all lived in their own apartments close by, preferring to keep their own spaces. The berthrooms on the base were kept for times when they were too injured or too drunk to stagger back to their apartments, or for the sake of guests, of both the willing and unwilling variety.

Blast Off found the medbay—brightly lit, well-ventilated and windowless—tucked away in the west wing on the ninth floor six weeks into his new routine, staffed mainly by a fleet of drones and two or three of the medics in Onslaught’s employment. The medics had hard optics and unsympathetic berthside manners, and the restraining clamps on the repair slabs looked like they saw regular use.

By the nature of their livelihood, mercenary forces racked up battle damage frequently. Blast Off could appreciate the logic of sidestepping any awkward questions a hospital might start asking by simply cutting it out of the equation altogether and keeping the medics who re-attached your missing limbs and welded up the bullet holes in your midsection on your payroll.

The ranks of the other mechs on the same payroll as the medics included Blast Off himself, Brawl the run-of-the-factory thug whose tendency towards loud bluster was only matched by his tendency towards forgetting common decorum, and Vortex the… was there a word for Vortex? Blast Off _suspected_ a deep coding malfunction, but that alone couldn’t explain Vortex. The interrogator was unnerving. He was often lurking in places Blast Off didn’t expect to find him in. On the surface there was nothing Blast Off would label as objectionable enough to file a complaint over. It was only small things. Such as when Vortex stood just a little closer than he had to during briefings, sometimes, and the triumphant glint across his visor when Blast Off was the one who stepped away to avoid getting jabbed in the side by his rotors made Blast Off convinced the helicopter was invading his personal space to make him uncomfortable on purpose. Brawl might annoy him, but Blast Off was wary of Vortex.

There were other support staff, but that was the core team’s current roster.

The Combaticons had a sniper before Blast Off. A grounder with fancy targeting systems named Blight. A freelancer on contract, not a permanent member of the team. They had another aerial soldier once too, a sleek fighter jet from Vos called Stormcloud who had been banned for life from setting foot on the grounds of the aerial academy he’d been trained in.

Blight had sickened from a fatal case of static spark syndrome he had come down with in Carpessa, and Stormcloud had been killed on an off-planet mission.

Blast Off was under the impression Brawl had already forgotten their names and Vortex only remembered them to rub it in that he had outlived them. Onslaught said nothing about them, besides a passing remark that Blight’s deactivation had led him to correct an oversight and require all Combaticons to keep their vaccines up to date as a rule.

Blast Off figured he knew what to make of Onslaught. Brawl was annoying and aggressive, Vortex was erratic and sly, and Onslaught was stoic on the surface, but not _emotionless_. It was just none of the rare flickers of emotion Blast Off glimpsed from the truck were particularly pleasant ones. Onslaught, as far as Blast Off could tell, possessed an emotional spectrum composed entirely of two feelings, arrogance and contempt. These emotions might have an assortment of facets to them, like arrogant entitlement or contemptuous rage with the failings of others but they were still the same two emotions at the core. Their leader had no sense of humor. None of Brawl’s wise-cracking got a laugh out of him, though admittedly Brawl wasn’t half as funny as the tank fancied himself to be.

Onslaught was uptight and ruthless, and cared only about getting results. Blast Off had flown over ore glaciers in the polar regions that seemed less hard than him.

Onslaught struck Blast Off as a thoroughly pitiless mech.

But he had been nothing but forward in dealing with Blast Off. He had made it clear what Blast Off was signing on for.

An open hand and a promise of payment.

There had been no pretenses, no beating around the point.

Blast Off couldn’t imagine being friends with him but that was fine. He didn’t require his newest employer to be his friend. He simply required competence and Onslaught had that in spades.

Onslaught ran the whole operation like a military base, the chain of command firmly adhered to and the corridors of the headquarters always kept swept clean, and business was conducted with uninterrupted efficiency. What more could be asked for in a leader? Blast Off respected that. A capable but remote one who dubbed himself much too good to lower himself to socialize with the rank-and-file on a casual basis was far preferable to a friendly but ultimately useless one who joked and went drinking with his mecha, but couldn’t make a critical call when it came down to the wire. While Blast Off doubted he would work with Onslaught as his boss for terribly long, he saw nothing that indicated his enlistment under the grounder wouldn’t be a satisfactory period while it lasted.

**////**

Several missions in, Blast Off could grudgingly concede through gritted denta (to himself and absolutely not aloud) that, however aggravating the idiots were _off_ -duty, on the job Vortex and Brawl were good at what they did.

They’d been hired on as guards for an illegal smuggling operation that spanned three city-states and they had pulled their weight when the transport was ambushed along the last leg of the nighttime journey down the northern waterways. Thick as he was, Brawl was a bot-smashing _menace_ in a fight and Vortex proved himself just as effective. Driving back the attackers from the cargo was a swift affair.

Brawl chunked a smoke bomb down into the deck of the smaller boat crewed by mechs trying to renew their attempts to board their transport and ducked to avoid getting a laser to the face. Leaving Vortex to provide cover fire, Blast Off palmed a welder and set about torching the ladder the attackers had magnetized to the side of the transport. Molten gobs dribbled onto the deck. Each drip hissed and steamed when it impacted wet metal.

“Got ‘em!” Brawl boomed.

Smoke exploded up from below. Outraged shouting followed. A fresh wave of laserfire poured up at them, noticeably worse in terms of aiming than before due to the haze.

A mech’s helm and shoulders rose out of the smoke as they tried to scale the ladder. Vortex shot them in the shoulder, and clutching at it with a yelp, the mech reeled and tumbled back into the smoke. Going by the sudden kerfuffle from below, their landing had been unwillingly cushioned by another one of the attackers.

“Keep them busy, I’m nearly done,” Blast Off said flatly, concentrating on his task. Once they’d cut off all the ladders latched onto the transport, the attackers would be confined to their small boat and they could sink it in one go with Brawl’s missiles. Let them swim back to the shoreline, if they hadn’t had the wits to stock their ambush with mechs who had alt modes built for sailing the waterways.

**////**

Blast Off visited the headquarter’s indoor shooting range on the eleventh floor for the first time several months into his new routine. It rapidly turned into one of his favorite places on the base.

He couldn’t use it whenever he pleased; Onslaught’s military approach to management leaked into this as well. Everybody who used the shooting range had to schedule their session in advance by at least one day, along with noting how long they intended the session to last, which guns would be used, difficulty level settings, and whether or not they wanted to permit an audience from the observation deck. All weapons had to be cleaned after usage and put away. Scheduling conflicts were settled on a first come, first serve basis. If they were not punctual in arriving to claim their session, the shooting range would automatically lock them out and then the unlucky employee had to reschedule for another time. Attempts to get around this were logged too and punished. (Onslaught believed in enforcing consequences for lateness.) All details were also logged into the database after a session was finished, including the accuracy scores and ammunition usage.

Usage of alt-mode weaponry was _prohibited_. If an employee wished to train in their alt mode, they were _expected_ to use the holosim center on the twelfth floor.

(The shuttle had a feeling Brawl had to do with why that rule was set in bold text and underlined twice in the instructions download pack.)

Blast Off’s sessions were solitary ones by choice.

Him, the gun in his hands, and the targets in his sight, circles outlined in bright red. Since he was indoors, he didn’t have to mark the direction of the wind as interference. Here, he didn’t have to deal with other people and the targets only did what they were programmed to do.

It calmed him.

Years ago Blast Off had first picked up a blaster because it annoyed him to be shot at by gangs of ruffians back when he was flying through the deep space routes without a means of returning fire. A preemptive measure. Its motives had lacked bloodlust. Any fatal damage done to his attackers back then had been a side-effect of the main intention— _stay away from me_.

He had enrolled in one of the shooting courses that were available to mecha with the right status and cash to spare. It had been a lark for quite a few of the trainees, a means to burn time that wasn’t attending the high-end social events and luncheons hosted by the local Senator and his entourage. They hadn’t taken the weapon in their hands seriously because they didn’t picture themselves in situations where it might be the one barrier between them and returning to Vector Sigma. Danger had been exciting to them, not threatening.

But Blast Off had taken it seriously.

It had been amusing to watch the other trainees in the course flail and miss their marks.

He hadn’t missed.

The teacher was once full of praise for him. Consistently hitting the target from longer and longer distances had been easy from the start for Blast Off. It still was. His aim had improved with time.

It wasn’t so different from calculating flight trajectories, he had told a fellow trainee once. It took trusting yourself to land the mark. To hit the bullseye each time. To stop thinking about where the bullet was right then and commit yourself to knowing where you wanted it to be.

**////**

A three-year job once had them crammed together in a small space while they staked out the client’s business rival’s house and by the end of it Blast Off was fantasizing about killing them all in their sleep.

If Onslaught wasn’t commandeering the single computer terminal in the hide-out, it was Brawl’s banging and clanging and stomping around and demanding to know when they were gonna slip in through the hole in the extensive security they were waiting for and _maim_ the glitch. Brawl had trouble grasping he was supposed to remember they were on a _stealth_ mission. And when Blast Off took a perfectly _reasonable_ amount of time in the washracks, Brawl complained at top volume there was no hot solvent left for them and to make matters worse, Onslaught and Vortex had agreed and Onslaught decreed Blast Off’s vanity didn’t take priority over the rest of the team’s right to a hot shower. So Blast Off suffered through a subpar cleaning job and a time limit to how long he was allowed to use the washracks.

Tarn was on the other side of the planet: Blast Off missed their headquarters. The complex’s chief virtue had morphed in his mind from its shooting range to its abundance of room.

There were three rooms in the hide-out, one for the washracks, one for the berths, and one for the stake-out work.

It left an inadequate amount of elbow room for its temporary residents.

In the enclosed space, tensions rose like the temperature in a cooking pot that wasn’t quite set to boiling. Onslaught and Brawl edged towards coming to blows twice. On the sidelines Vortex acted if this was free entertainment. Blast Off debated distracting him from rooting them on, but it occurred to him that doing so would turn Vortex’s attention from them to _him_. If there had been another teammate to keep Vortex from getting bored, Blast Off might have anyway and diverted the problem to them, but there were only the four of them.

So Blast Off saved himself the headache and didn’t. Brawl had a fist-sized dent on his chest later. Onslaught continued to hog the hide-out’s bandwidth, denying Brawl the chance to watch the latest insipid holodrama series he had gotten into.

Cut off from his terrible taste in holovids, Brawl sulked.

After their mark was dealt with, Blast Off didn’t pretend the emotion that licked his spark when he touched down in Tarn was anything but strut-melting relief that he could lock himself in his apartment flat and bury himself in a novel he’d been meaning to catch up on and take a _break_ from the team.

**////**

“You’re really one hell of a shot!” Vortex said, venting heavily and crouching low as Blast Off crawled after him into the shade under the low-hanging bridge.

Energon streaking down the side of his helm, Blast Off narrowed his visor at him and wiped the energon off so it wouldn’t drip into his optics. His fingers came away bright pink. Minor alerts scrolled down his HUD. He scoffed. “Tell me. What, precisely, did you think I was hired onto this team for, Vortex? My _juggling_ skills?”

They had gotten bad information for this job and things had gone south in a hurry. He’d bailed Vortex out of a tough spot by sniping out the target and while it had been a magnificent shot that few others had the skill for in Blast Off’s humble opinion, especially when he hadn’t used a stable resting position for the rifle—it had blown Blast Off’s cover and both he and Vortex had been forced to flee the scene in a hurry. With the air traffic lanes swarming with the enforcers, transformation was out of the question. They would have to walk on foot through the district, dodging through back alleys and the underlevels to get out of the city and to the rendezvous point where they could make a getaway. It was slow going. Tedious. Blast Off didn’t know how grounders put up with it. Wheels could make up for only so much. But right now, the enforcers were close. So they were stuck under the bridge until they went away.

If Vortex tried to stab him in the optic again or something similarly unexpected and unpleasant, Onslaught’s displeasure be damned, Blast Off would leave him for the enforcers. He _would_.

Vortex flapped a hand (his remaining one) at him. “Don’t be a smartaft. Nobody likes smartafts, Blasters.”

That was just outrageous, coming out of the vocalizer of one of the biggest smartafts Blast Off had the misfortune to meet. “My accuracy scores on the range _are_ available to mechs with your clearance level,” Blast Off reminded him. “I refuse to believe for a moment you haven’t already checked them before this.”

Vortex said. “Scores from a nice controlled environment like the range are different from firing under live conditions.”

The purple light shining in Blast Off’s visor thinned at him, “I’d feel better about your compliment then if you weren’t the reason why I had to blow my cover.”

Vortex sniggered loudly, leaning back against the bridge’s metal abutment and regarding him with hooded optics. He could stand to be more serious about the danger of the situation they were in. Blast Off shuffled to the edge of the bridge’s cover and leaned out of its shadow to scan the area for approaching enforcers.

Energon dribbled down Vortex’s arm.

“It wasn’t on _purpose_ ,” Vortex said from where he was crouched. “I gave you kudos for being a good shot, give me credit for not having the power to read minds ‘cuz that’s the only way somebody in my spot would’ve avoided that mistake!”

“... Fine. Thanks.”

Vortex wasn’t to blame for the bad information. He wasn’t the one who had failed to properly vet the intel before dispatching them.

“We got the job done, but Onslaught’s gonna be mad at us when we get back.”

Blast Off snorted.

“He’s the one who formulated a plan based off poor intel, _not_ us. He can’t blame us for his error.”

“Like that would stop an ars—”

Blast Off sharply held up a hand.

Vortex’s words cut off. On the bridge above them, frenzied footsteps and snarling engines stampeded past. Blast Off shrank away from the edge of the bridge and further out of view, air filtration vents clamping shut. The two Combaticons kept still in their hiding place until the area was quiet again, save for the drip of acidic solvent leaking onto rusted metal from a broken pipeline.

 _Plink. Plink. Plink_.

“Let’s keep moving,” Vortex said.

They crawled out from the bridge and climbed into the underlevels.

Running from the sewer nest of mutated retrorats they proceeded to stumble headlong into was not the most undignified end to a day Blast Off ever had. It was however, one he had no desire to _ever_ repeat. Coated in gutter grime and bits of dead retrorats, and wheezing through his ventilation systems from sprinting by the time they reached the rendezvous point, Vortex jabbed him in the side and called it a bonding experience. Similarly dishevelled and one of his legs bearing bite marks from sharp denta gnawing on it, Blast Off couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

But a week and half later marked the first time Vortex invited Blast Off out for a night in the city with him and Brawl.

And Blast Off said yes.

Even waking up with confetti in odd places the next morning didn’t dampen his spirits.

**////**

Tarn was a city of activity at all hours. It never slept. Up in the wealthy districts, spires glowing with synthetic neon lights arched out of the city blocks to scratch at the darkening dusk. Their height was sufficient to grant them the privilege of life above the thickest of the smog and extreme light pollution. The canopy of stars were theirs to view at any time. Down in the city’s innards, down in the industrial districts, stood the factories, and below them the great smelting pools, their old girths so wide a Titan could have braved the barely-ventable air quality and wedged both feet into one to soak, roiling and burbling with metal sludge tinted the iridescent rainbow of colors born from metal heated until it ran like liquid. Thanks to the wind, the hot musk of burning waste disposed of in those pools was heavy in today’s Tarnian weather forecast.

Wide avenues between the towering hefts of buildings opened into a plaza. Corrosion stained the walls. Vendors and shops lined the edge. Merchants hawked their wares from booths in its center. Traffic was clogging up several arteries of the roadway more often than not. Blast Off had flown down most of the way, but seventeen street levels below the city’s top crust, he had switched to walking.

Tarn was awake and active. But that included—

“Blast Off!”

Blast Off strongly contemplated pretending he didn’t know the mech waving and calling out to him yet again over the din.

“Blast Off. HEY. ARE YOU DEAF. _BLAST OFF_!”

A black cannon barrel bobbed in the throng.

Brawl was shouting, pushing through the plaza’s crowds.

Blast Off heaved a sigh.

An unlucky ambulance narrowly avoided getting flattened to the pavement by Brawl knocking him over and angrily wailed his sirens after Brawl as he lumbered away. Another passing mech took note of this and referred to Brawl by a word that would have offended even the most mild-natured bot. Predictably, not being remotely mild-natured, Brawl took offense and made a swing at him, but the other mech dodged and melted away into the crowds. Brawl made a rude hand gesture at where the other mech had vanished.

Since Blast Off had started accompanying him and Vortex on a few of their outings, for reasons Blast Off wasn’t entirely clear on, Brawl seemed to have proven himself dim enough to take this as a cue to consider him a friend, or at a minimum somebody to slap on the back and talk too loudly at. Blast Off was rather leery of that. He wasn’t here to befriend his latest crew. But it was too much trouble to tell Brawl he was overstepping himself when he could just humor him until his attention wandered and the tank went away. Brawl was so easily distracted. It wasn’t as if they shared many common interests outside of the workplace.

And it wasn’t like Blast Off wanted company.

It was simply too much trouble to pick up his pace and ignore Brawl when the oaf wanted to be noticed in public. That was all. Obviously.

“My audials are functioning _fine,_ ” Blast Off’s vocalizer emitted a click. “You have my frequency, you could have commed me instead of making a scene.”

“Eh, yeah, I guess so,” said Brawl, catching up with him. Due to how little of a frag he gave about Blast Off’s complaints, the implied criticism bounced off him like a rubber bullet.

Blast Off shook his helm.

“Idiot.”

‘“And ya’ can blow it out your sprocket too, Blast Off. Slagging cross-wired skidplate,” Brawl retorted. Brawl’s crassness was old news to Blast Off; he continued to not approve of it. “What are you doin’ down here?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

Brawl shrugged, not having anything to hide. “I was hungry. There’s this really great goodie stand that sells oil cakes in this plaza, by the eastern junction. Nobody else can make ‘em like they can.” At Blast Off’s visor dulling, Brawl produced with gusto three wrapped-up oil cakes in his hands, the dark crust congealing like cooling tar, sprinkled with curls of steel shavings and stinking of petroleum under the clear plastic. “Still nice and hot!”

Blast Off’s back tailfin flicked as they walked.

“Then we have similar reasons for coming here,” Blast Off stated. “There’s a detailer’s facility for private clients down here which I frequented when I visited Tarn before.” He might not be able to peruse the upscale shops as easily anymore, but there were dens even in the underlevels, reserved for those with an eye for luxury and the credits to shell out to enjoy it. There was an oil bath with Blast Off’s name on it awaiting, and he was going to lay back and soak long and happily in it while letting the attendants tighten up the cables in his joints and buff and scrub the dirt off his plating and heat shields and have all his day’s minor troubles float away. “I booked a maintenance appointment.”

Plastic crinkled.

Unwrapping one of the oil cakes, Brawl cracked the treat in half, crumbling it under his fingers, its dense and dark blue gelled center oozing out.

“Ya’ trust the medics at HQ to patch you up after getting shot to pieces, but not to handle a few loose wires?”

Coming from Onslaught or Vortex, there would have been a flinty calculation behind that question. (And with Onslaught, Blast Off could not shake the recent feeling the mech was testing him, watching him, some scheme of his that Blast Off was not privy to lurking under the surface of their interactions.) Not Brawl. His question was just what it appeared to be. It was simple. No judgement, no prodding evaluation.

So Blast Off’s answer was equally straightforward.

“HQ’s medics aren’t here to pamper us, just keep us alive,” Blast Off said, “I can afford to treat myself to a little luxury.”

“Can I come along?”

Blast Off flapped a hand, “You are _drastically_ overestimating how much I’m willing to put up with from you.”

Brawl whined.

“C’mon! It’s not like you’re gettin’ reformatted or nothin’!”

“I’m not paying for you to get an appointment, just me. You’ll be like a bull in a microchip factory.”

“No, I won’t!” Brawl objected.

“And it will bore you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Trust me, I do.”

“Do _not_ , fragger.”

“Insults don’t help your argument, Brawl.”

**////**

“That gun looks like a custom job. If you may, could I take a look?” A smarmy and well-greased smile at the ready on his lips, Swindle sat himself down next to Blast Off one of the couches in the common room. Mask locked across his face, Blast Off set his gun down in his lap and met faux-guileless optics tinted the same purple as his own visor, just illuminated a few shades brighter on the spectrum.

“Just a look?”

“Nothing else!” Swindle chirped. Blast Off passed the gun over to him.

“Give it back once you’re done,” he instructed.

“You bet.” Swindle turned the gun over in his hands, and knifed the red line of a scan over it. “Ionic blaster, model… E62-Mark B-17, if I’m not mistaken. In pretty condition! I haven’t seen one of these suckers for awhile. The series isn’t in production anymore, after the manufacturers switched from armaments to the electronics industry.”

“Correct.”

“And say, were you the one behind the customizations or did you pay somebody else to handle that?” Swindle expertly clicked open the barrel to take a look at the power cells wired into the inner mechanisms.

“I did it myself. Before you get any ideas, it’s not for sale,” Blast Off said, cold.

“Selling off a custom job like this?” Swindle said smoothly. “I would _never_ presume you’d part with a weapon like it unless you had to.”

As he watched Swindle fiddle with the gun, Blast Off acknowledged the jeep was skilled. Swindle knew his way around a gun like he had been sparked for the function and his immediate recollection of an incident that had occurred centuries ago spoke to a mech who devoted a sizable portion of his well-maintained memory banks to anything and everything that might impact his sales or impress a customer into not questioning his credentials.

Blast Off could see why Onslaught had taken him on.

Onslaught and Vortex had known each other before the team had formed. Brawl had been brought to Onslaught’s attention and on board by Vortex, according to Brawl anyway. When Swindle joined the team, their new munitions specialist’s name had shown up on the core roster one day and Onslaught had simply informed them that was how it was going to be.

“Boss-mech’s preferred arms dealer,” had been the first mention of Swindle by name Blast Off had heard, on a day clouded over with smog ages before the con-mech formally joined the team: Vortex had hovered his hand flat in the air to indicate a mech that just barely came up to Vortex’s chest in height. “That’s who he’s talking to. Greedy little shortie. Yellow, got these _biiiig_ purple optics. He’s got his fingers in a slice of the pie with pretty much every dirty dealing in Tarn and half of Cybertron to boot too.”

Leaning on the walkway’s railing with his arms crossed at the wrists, Blast Off had looked down at the top of Onslaught’s helm as the truck gestured severely with his free hand to accompany what he was saying to the mech on the other end of the commlink.

“Swindle, hmm?” Blast Off said idly. “What about the other half of Cybertron?”

“The dealings on the other half _could_ be legal,” Vortex mused.

“I’m sensing from your tone the probability of that is very low.”

“Legal, illegal, I doubt our pal Swindle cares which as long it makes him credits.”

“Ah. That sort.”

Below them, Onslaught paced.

The circular control center was housed in the upper floors of the base, consoles and tall viewscreens lining the curved walls. An electronic hum premutated the air. The holographic globe rotating silently in its terminal in the center of the room had limned the ridges of Onslaught’s armor in glowing orange. Yellow dots marched in clusters across its transparent surface. One of the upper landings Blast Off and Vortex were standing on harbored the door that led to an anteroom and Onslaught’s work office.

“It’s _cute_ , if you like your ‘bots small and capable of shipping a proton bomb to your doorstep within 24 hours after your order for the right price.” Vortex tipped his helm in the way that Blast Off had learned indicated the helicopter was grinning. “Onslaught likes him because he’s useful like that. The best there is at getting his hands on high quality weaponry.”

Blast Off rubbed the base of his heel on the floor. “Is he an ally or just a useful convenience?”

“Swindle’s scams have earned him a list of enemies as long as Metroplex, but the Combaticons ain’t one of ‘em.” Vortex had replied. “Yet, anyway.”

Now, Swindle sat on the couch next to Blast Off, asking him an endless stream of professional, clever questions about his blaster and tried to sell him on a dozen of snappy-sounding but unreasonably priced ‘upgrades’ for it that Blast Off just as endlessly turned down.

Swindle called himself a Combaticon these days and took his new teammates along with him to his arms deals and aided in negotiations and submitted reports to Onslaught like they all had to sometimes after a mission.

Blast Off pondered how honest those reports Swindle typed up were.

How genuine was Swindle about giving his allegiance to the team?

Vortex hadn’t been exeraggrating when he summed up Swindle as driven by a core-deep desire for profit. What did Swindle get out of this, besides now having teammates who would be obliged to protect him from dissatisfied past customers who might come calling at his door? Onslaught didn’t seem to care how many enterprises and embezzlement schemes Swindle ran on the side, so long as Swindle didn’t get caught and so long as Swindle listened to orders when Onslaught gave them. Was Swindle scamming them too? It wasn’t likely, but it also wasn’t impossible. Blast Off didn’t always know what was going through Onslaught’s processor in terms of risk being weighed against benefits. He couldn’t pin down what their leader’s angle was when it came to Blast Off himself sometimes, let alone what Onslaught thought of Swindle.

But Blast Off supposed it wasn’t his place to question Onslaught’s hiring practices.

**////**

It was pleasant, to transform into his alt mode and nestle down into the ship bay he was docked into. His cables and pitted plating still ached from the meteorite shower he’d been caught in but that would go away soon. Self-repair would take care of it. He had started shutting down non-essential subsystems and queuing up a list of the ones to put on standby, all the easier to re-calibrate them for his preferred sensitivity to planetside conditions, preparing to cycle down into recharge when there was a quiet sound.

One of the hangar’s side doors slid open. A switch clicked. The lights turned on. A mech walked in and stopped just a short distance from the door. He then changed his course and headed towards where Blast Off was docked. Footsteps rang hollowly off the ceiling: the mech didn’t hurry.

Reluctant and groggy, Blast Off powered back up his optical sensors to track his approach.

“Onslaught, sir.”

Onslaught’s small form came to a halt where Blast Off’s boarding ramp would be lowered if they were going on a mission.

“It’s late. Shouldn’t you have left for the night by now?”

“I’m aware of the time,” Blast Off replied haughtily. “Which is why I was _trying_ to recharge when you interrupted me.”

The truck circled around to the front of the ship bay. Blast Off remained immobile in his alt mode and kept his sensors locked onto him. Onslaught leaned up and tapped the rounded expanse of his nosecone. “My apologies. I thought Brawl was the one with the habit of recharging in alt mode, not you. And to do it in the hangar?”

Blast Off huffed through his speakers, not bothering to fully stir himself. “I simply felt like a change of pace, and my own quarters are too small to house my alt mode. I don’t recall there being a _rule_ against it.”

“There isn’t,” Onslaught said.

“Then why ask, sir?”

Onslaught’s voice was dry. “Perhaps I was curious about your reasons, not about a chance to reprimand you.”

“Oh.” The shuttle paused and the field Blast Off was usually more careful to keep blank fluctuated, a little unsure. “Well. Uhm. I… You see...”

Onslaught pulled his hand away from the brief contact and glanced downward. “Does it have anything to do with why the floor’s littered with rubbish that shouldn’t be there, by chance?” He scooped a rock up and under the bright lights, the pits and grooves pockmarking its iron surface showed well.

“There was a meteorite shower. I wasn’t paying attention like I ought to,” Blast Off admitted begrudgingly. And it had resulted in him having to sit down and shuffle pieces of those damned meteorites and space dust out of his internal structure. By the end of it, he just hadn’t wanted to exert the energy for flying all the way back to his apartment tonight when he was already at the base and it harbored a ship bay in his alt mode’s size that he could rest in. “It’s uncomfortable to have debris lodged in places it shouldn’t be.” He added, “I would have called in a drone to clean up after I woke up in the morning, of course.”

Having experienced getting a rock or two jammed in his axle while driving down lousy roadways, Onslaught could accept that confession. “Even somewhere as empty as space has its hazards,” he said. “See to it that this gets cleaned up in a timely manner and I’ll let this slide.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Setting aside your mishap on the return voyage… How was Monacus?”

“It hasn’t changed,” Blast Off remarked, graciously permitting the attempt at small talk. “As much of a cesspit as ever. I swear to Primus, it’s like the place popped out of Swindle’s fever dreams. All anybody wants to talk about is _fiance_ and fleshy _organics_ and how to rip them off. Ugh.” His tailfin wagged. “If I wanted to waste my time on a horde like that, I’d just visit the Senate hall. I wouldn’t need to take a shower afterwards, which gives it a leg up on Monacus.”

“Haha!”

If he had been less tired and groggy and had he been in root mode, Blast Off would have drawn back, resetting his visor in surprise. He couldn’t recall having heard Onslaught so much as chuckle aloud before.

Or guessed that the perpetually stern mech had anything approaching a sense of humor installed.

“You could have taken a page out of Brawl’s book and squished a few fleshlings to make yourself feel better, if you were that bored.”

“And get their gunk all over my foot? _No thanks_. Don’t put me and Brawl on the same level.”

“Finicky.”

“You’re describing yourself. I just have standards.”

“I prefer to think of it as _fastidious_ , not finicky.”

“If you say so.”

Onslaught shook his helm at him, but it was a gesture without anger. Their conversation meandered onward without purpose for another half hour before Onslaught excused himself. “I’ll let you get back to recharging, Blast Off. After all, at this hour, I should be preparing for it myself.”

“Thank you. Recharge well,” Blast Off was polite.

“Have a good dream,” Onslaught said. He turned off the lights in the hangar and closed the door behind him as he went away, and left Blast Off alone in the darkness.

Blast Off didn’t bother to keep his optical sensors online to watch him go.

**////**

With Brawl playing the role of bodyguard to the security consultant Swindle was posing as, Swindle was two days into phony negotiations when Blast Off reported that he, Onslaught, and Vortex had located where the mob was keeping their hostage at last. Vortex had volunteered to act out the bodyguard role during the planning stages: Onslaught had ignored him and handed the job off to Brawl, since Vortex had spent the preceding hours of the briefing deliberately antagonizing Swindle and Onslaught didn’t want the job jeopardized by them having it at each other and trying to rip each other’s fuel pumps out at a bad time, especially when success hinged on getting the hostage out alive. This was a recuse, not an assassination gig.

The Engineering guild wasn’t going to pay up for a greyed out body.

The first problem they ran into after Vortex ghosted through security and left a guard’s corpse stapled to the floor with a knife to the processor wasn’t that the hostage was chained to the wall in his corner nor that his vocalizer was turned off. Not a big deal, Onslaught had anticipated that and Vortex had brought along disablers for the handcuffs. And Vortex didn’t need the mech babbling. The problem was that one of the hostage’s legs was leaking oil and sitting on the opposite side of the room from his upper frame and the hostage was drugged out of his processor. Meaning the useless lump couldn’t _walk_ anywhere fast.

Awesome.

Just great.

Ugh.

Vortex was not going to _carry_ the lump around like a sparkling, no _sir_.

The second problem was that the signal disruptors in the room meant Vortex couldn’t tell the rest of the Combaticons this.

So when Vortex had to stop to jam the leg back on and didn’t report back with the hostage as quickly as he should have, Onslaught started telegraphing frustration with being behind his painstakingly constructed schedule. Swindle’s negotiations would last as a distraction from the rest of the team snooping around behind the scenes for only so long. Blast Off pinged Vortex’s comm through the private team channel to tell him to stop dawdling.

Vortex didn’t respond.

After a short discussion, Blast Off and Onslaught split up, Blast Off to drag Vortex away from what had stopped him from answering his comm, and Onslaught to fetch Swindle and Brawl.

“Is that Skipjack?” Blast Off stared at the minibot staggering along behind Vortex in the corridor. Fear and confusion radiated off him and one leg of his dragged awkwardly. His optics were pale with the effects of energon starvation.

“Yeah,” Vortex wiped oily hands off on his hip. “I checked, it’s not a decoy bot painted up like him.”

“Very well. We’re professionals and we’re here to rescue you,” Blast Off briskly informed Skipjack. Who was probably too drugged up to register his words, just standing there, swaying in place. “Don’t put up a fight.” He shot a glance at Vortex. “And explain to me why my comm was online until it stopped working six minutes ago.”

“Bot in charge of rigging up the alarms likes him some signal disrupters.”

“Hmph. I see.”

“Ughmm,” was Skipjack’s dazed comment.

Their comms buzzed to life the moment they were out of the disrupters’ range.

< _There’s been a change in plans._ > Onslaught’s voice was smooth. In the background, Swindle was hissing something garbled at somebody. < _If you’ve found that thrice-damned Vortex, Blast Off, move it. Brawl and I require back-up._ >

< _Vortex_ —>

< _Hahah! Did you miss me after just five measly hours, o’ fearless leader? Sorry we can’t all live life according to your precious scheduling! Slag comes up!_ >

<— _Vortex is_ unfortunately _accounted for. We’re on our way._ >

Cutting the comm before he had to listen to Onslaught giving Vortex a dressing down for his insubordinate tone and constant backtalking, Blast Off stained his audials and somewhere nearby, over the sizzle of sudden laserfire, he swore he heard Brawl’s guns rattling off rounds into the air and a smoke bomb exploding upon impact with a target.

“Sounds like a lot of _somebodies_ found out Swindle was pulling one over ‘em,” Vortex drawled.

With Skipjack tucked under Blast Off’s arm, they took off for where Onslaught was. By the end of the shootout, they’d stuffed Skipjack into Swindle’s alt mode for ease of transportation (and to free up both of Blast Off’s hands for aiming) and Brawl was pumped up enough on berserker rage that he almost turned around and went back to finish off the stragglers that were shooting wildly in their direction before Onslaught stopped him by whacking him in the helm and telling him to follow _fragging_ instructions and not run in the _wrong_ direction, or getting shot by gangsters would be the _least_ painful thing Brawl had to look forward to in his immediate future. They kept going. Of course, right when the Combaticons thought they had made a clean getaway, that’s when the hidden device welded inside Skipjack’s backplating started beeping mid-escape.

Ever the one to state the obvious, Brawl yelled. “Bomb!”

Swindle slammed on his brakes. His headlights flared.

“And that, mechs, is my cue. Getting blown up is at the bottom of my to-do list for today. In fact, it’s not on my to-do list at _all_.” Swindle couldn’t transform and chunk Skipjack out of his passenger seat in the process fast enough; Blast Off caught Skipjack before the minibot fell over. Swindle put a healthy distance between himself and where Blast Off was standing, and then put a tank between them too, for good measure.

“Wha… What’s goin-g ‘n?” Skipjack slurred. “Where am I? Why are ya’ rescuin… Where’s that noise comin’ from?”

Blast Off turned his frame over, triangulating the beeping to its source. The other Combaticons watched the dim light blinking in time with the beeping through the near invisible gaps of Skipjack’s transformation seams.

“Why is something beeping?” Skipjack grumbled.

“It would be better if you’re not conscious for this,” Blast Off said firmly and knocked him out.

The red light continued to blink.

“We’re not getting paid to return him to the client as a corpse,” Onslaught declared. He twitched a finger at Vortex. “Get to work.”

“Why do I gotta put my hands inside a mech’s wiring twice in a day if I’m not gonna’ get to kill ‘im afterwards? So _unfair_ ,” Vortex complained, already stepping forward despite his pouting. “It blows. Brawl, c’mere. You got experience with defusing explosives. Blast Off, hold the body still while I cut. Onslaught, Swindle, frag off and don’t get in the way.”

Scuttling behind Onslaught as his new blast shield when Brawl moved away, Swindle said, “Frag you too, Tex.”

“You wish!”

Skipjack was spared being unceremoniously exploded from the inside out in the end, though he wouldn’t have been reassured by the casual way the Combaticons discussed his odds had he been awake to hear them.

At the arranged rendezvous five days later, a cohort of guildmechs were waiting.

At the front of the group, a brawny grounder with thick arms and a large chin-guard stood anxiously. Weld marks crisscrossed in a silvery coat over his back for his nanite colonies to handle, Skipjack ignored the rest of the cohort and threw himself at Bulkhead with a relieved shout. Bulkhead swept his amica off the ground for a hug.

Onslaught, Swindle tagging at his heels now that they were handling the matters of payment for services rendered, closed in.

While he didn’t mind the reunion himself, Blast Off could guess from the flexing of his rotors Vortex had to put in a truly heroic effort to not pantomime gagging at the sappy scene. Brawl was plain bored. Blast Off didn’t say anything. He did, however, discreetly step on Vortex’s foot when the connvining little helicopter looked to be fixing to open his mouth and say something that Bulkhead and Skipjack would _not_ appreciate being in audio range thereof.

The pay the Combaticons received for their work was nothing to sniff at, but it was still lower than the hefty ransom the mob had demanded from Bulkhead in return for them not mailing Skipjack back to him—piece by piece, starting with his fingers and ending with his spark chamber and T-cog—and less humiliating than letting it become public knowledge the guild head’s amica had been kidnapped and used for blackmail.

Back at the base, Onslaught pulled Blast Off aside.

“You performed well,” Onslaught said.

“During the job or today?”

“Both. And the last three jobs that preceded this. I approve. Consider this my commendation of your work ethic as an employee and the results you produce.”

“I’m good at this. No offense, sir, but the day I require your approval is the day Cybertron falls into the nearest black hole. I didn’t do it for your praise.” Blast Off sniffed, then the expression in his visor changed and he relented slightly. With two troublemakers in the ranks, Onslaught’s tone suggested he was probably just attempting to communicate his gratitude for a subordinate who didn’t require that he bail them out of their latest visit to jail on a semi-yearly basis. And Blast Off was rather hoping for a raise. Soon. “However, I accept the compliment. Thank you.”

Onslaught crossed his arms.

“There are professionals I hired who are good at what they do, but found themselves,” Onslaught chose his words carefully, “... _Floundering_ when it came to cooperating with Vortex in the workplace. Or perhaps, you might call it failing to take him in stride.” Onslaught said. “It was irritating, as you can imagine, to find replacement staff. It’s gratifying you don’t share their incompetencies.”

Blast Off’s engine gave a loud throttle.

Light gleamed off the angles of Blast Off’s mask.

“Try as he _might_ , Vortex doesn’t top my roster of the most aggravating mechanisms I have had the displeasure of working with.” He ground his dentae, the memories of having to endure incompetent leadership from past employers surfacing before he banished them. “Vortex knows what he’s doing. He’s not a fool, even if he’s glitched in the helm and it amuses him to _act_ like one.”

Blast Off didn’t understand it. Why subject oneself to that, no matter how helpful it was to have others underestimate you?

The truck shrugged.

“Vortex enjoys weaselling a reaction out of ‘bots.”

“So I have learned. How perverse.” Blast Off said. “I don’t think Bulkhead would have appreciated that.”

“Not in the slightest.”

The shrug and the tacitly resigned look in Onslaught’s visor told Blast Off that sentence was uttered from a place of what Blast Off labelled long-suffering familiarity with the matters that came with the bulk of a functioning being lived in proximity to a mech like Vortex. That look reminded Blast Off of the bite marks bestowed by a nest of mutant retrorats and the smell emanated from an oil cake after one cracked it open and the snap of a blaster’s barrel sliding aside. Blast Off didn’t waste more than a flicker of processor power as to why his mind made the link, thin and small as it was, before ignoring it altogether but—it was there.

It was... something.

Hardly undying loyalty, no, not yet, but—something.

Something more than indifference.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is part of the backstory I used for the Combaticons in Escape Velocity. I personally tend to view IDW Onslaught/Blast Off as being very much not an “attraction/love at first sight” sort of ship. They didn’t warm up to each other right away.
> 
> I’ll try to post updates for this at a reasonable pace. I do have a dreamwidth account where I’ll be putting fic [notes](https://trajectorion.dreamwidth.org/2272.html) for this if that interests any of the readers.


	2. there are many loves but only one war

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the timeless motto of Cybertronians everywhere: mistakes were made.

Blast Off stretched his shoulders, curled his fingers, leisurely warming up his systems in preparation for the bout. His flight protocols have already passed their diagnostics.

Blast Off could take his time. Brawl wasn’t close enough to take a swing at him, not yet.

Shiny and black, the weight of the laser cannon mods mounted on his legs was new. Blast Off kept wanting to check his balance against them, the pre-programmed and foreign algorithms that had been installed alongside them still slowly integrating and not yet on the level of instinct. His frame hadn’t rejected the mods, but it was better to not rush the process.

Around the shuttle, the walls of the holosim center shimmered and dissolved with a flurry of pixels into a small, barren coastline. Brawl had been the one to choose their artificial battleground since Blast Off was the one who had requested a spar.

Blast Off got to test out his new cannons on a moving target with thick defenses configured for maximum resilience. Tanks were so often frontliners for a reason. Brawl got to practice fighting an airborne enemy: the metallic cliffs and rocks of the coastline provided cover from air surveillance that he could use. Ripping apart sparring drones was all well and good, but there was something to be said for an opponent that had a spark of creativity.

Brawl circled around, like a cage fighter. Blast Off circled in the opposite direction, keeping a steady distance from his opponent. There was a gleeful light in Brawl’s orange optic band. He wanted to pound Blast Off into tinfoil.

All in the spirit of friendly competition, really.

And getting clearance to repeatedly hit somebody.

Brawl charged.

Blast Off dodged his punch, then the following full-body tackle, ignited his thrusters and jumped into the air. The sounds of transformation preceded Brawl throwing himself into alt mode below. His barrel came swivelling up to lock onto the other mech. The first missile whizzed past but the second one slammed into his leg and exploded with a _whump_. Blast Off was knocked backward by several meters. He hissed, snapped his leg cannons into position and returned fire.

**////**

Vortex was a gossipmonger, the cruel sort. And it wasn’t just for the sake of collecting blackmail material, Blast Off discovered, though Vortex did that frequently too. Scandals amused him and the miseries of others inappropriately thrilled him. He kept a keen optic out for the mild fluxes in a mech’s field that were the telltale giveaways of a liar. He ferreted out dirt. The more sordid and personally discomforting the details, the more Vortex loved to learn them. He had no respect for other mechs’ privacy. He ignored personal boundaries, since shame was an alien concept to him.

Blast Off had come home to his apartment flat one day and found Vortex flipping through his datapads and wandering around in his flat like he’d owned the place.

Which he didn’t.

Blast Off did.

So he promptly kicked Vortex (now with additional dents) out into the street and told him in no uncertain terms to not repeat this behavior _ever_ again. Then he changed all of his access codes and double-checked the security measures he’d set up to keep intruders from getting inside without alerting him.

He invested in new traps, just in case.

Vortex, cheerfully uncaring, broke into his apartment a week later without springing them, taped a note to the energon distiller thanking Blast Off for the coolant that Vortex had helped himself to, and plopped a still-leaky souvenir from a fun jaunt in Ibex in his washracks. Sure, Blast Off probably wouldn’t be too thrilled by the energon drying in a smiley face smeared across the mirror nor that Vortex had nabbed his most high-end can of imported polish with no intentions of returning it, but what was the shuttle going to do about it? Would he lodge a complaint with Onslaught when he hadn’t over Vortex’s past antics during briefings or take matters into his own hands?

Vortex wanted to find out. As their leader had observed, he thrived on getting a response—any response—and part of getting along with your teammates was knowing in advance what buttons to hit and what buttons to leave alone unless you wanted to get slagged.

He liked Blast Off. Vortex wasn’t faking that.

It just didn’t cross his mind that ‘liking somebody’ was often equated to ‘not screwing with them’ in most mechs’ processors.

Blast Off was _not_ thrilled.

Vortex, after getting knocked unconscious in his own apartment and major parts of his comm system broken and rewired before Blast Off trussed him up and dropped him headfirst into a scrap pile in an inaccessible dumpster, just close enough to one of the city’s smelter pools for the temperatures to be constantly and bakingly, increasingly uncomfortable—not fatal, just uncomfortable, and wasn’t that interesting, Vortex noted, that Blast Off had opted for simple humiliation rather than skipping directly to a murder attempt—and with only an angry teammate as the one clued in enough on his whereabouts to pick him up in a timely manner, dumped an hour of (insincere) apologies for going a step too far in messing with him into Blast Off’s inbox.

Blast Off waited four more hours before he softened and responded.

And a good two hours after that, Blast Off came and fished him out.

Blast Off didn’t believe the apologies one bit but he believed he had gotten the lesson through.

Vortex popped his knuckles and rotated his arms, shaking them out so the energon in his lines could start flowing properly again. His outer plating had gone hot and scorched bare at spots. Ouch. And those cables had been wound _tight_. Blast Off could tie a mean knot.

“So! Ya’ got me, fair and square!” he said, then hazarded, “Can we go hang out at your place now?”

Blast Off found he could only sigh. “You are so improper.”

He turned around and walked away without another word.

Which wasn’t a ‘no.’

Rotors snapping upright behind him, Vortex hummed a high note and trotted after Blast Off, smiling dangerously.

Blast Off didn’t tell him to go away.

Vortex hadn’t had to give an apology. Vortex could have just waited it out, burnt plating and all, until Onslaught had noticed his interrogator’s absence and demanded answers from the others. Blast Off would have _had_ to spit out his location then.

But this way was faster.

As carefully as he did the good tibits of gossip that floated by his audials Vortex squirreled away the information that Blast Off liked his space and that Blast Off’s fuse took a long, long time to burn down to the wick but once it did, Blast Off could shift gears from passive-aggressive dismissal to proactive offense _fast_.

**////**

Everything was painted soft and still blue by the moonlight.

There had been a time when that moonlight streamed from two moons, but that era had ended millenia before Onslaught had been built.

The plains sprawled out, featureless and flat. The road Onslaught drove on was a thin ribbon, rolling and dipping with the landscape’s folds, tiny in the expanse. Even the peaks of the mountains had dwindled to faint bulges on the horizon. He hadn’t seen another Cybertronian except in passing for hours and life was the occasional dim form of a turbofox scampering into a crevice in the ground. A road sign telling him that it was so many miles from the next exit and much longer than that to the next fuel depot flashed up as a square of silver, reflective surface catching the harsh glare of his headlights as he passed it.

In the silence disturbed only by the grind of his own tires on the asphalt, he heard the building rumble of interstellar engines a good ways off before the shuttle bearing in from behind caught up to him.

A wide shadow slid over him and dwarfed his alt mode.

Blast Off had once told Onslaught he could sight and hit a target from orbit—they hadn’t had a mission that required an orbital sniper and it didn’t seem likely they ever would, so it’s not something Onslaught needed to know but Blast Off had been explaining the difference in how he saw in his alt mode and how he saw in his root mode. Blast Off was much less than a mile above him—he would be able to distinguish with ease the optical sensors Onslaught turned skywards, towards his underbelly.

< _Didn’t you have an errand to run in Tarn?_ > Onslaught radioed up at Blast Off.

Blast Off replied mildly, _< I wrapped it up faster than I anticipated. I didn’t hang around afterwards.>_ His next words had an unabashed undertone. _< Not that you need to concern yourself about that, sir, since it had nothing to do with you._>

< _Given the errand was your excuse for why Vortex and Brawl had to take the transit mono-line rather than you transporting them and the payload, I’m entitled to ask about it_.>

< _You have_ wheels _. And a road. You can drive, even if it’s slower than flying._ > He turned a roll midair and Onslaught was aware that despite his lofty tone, Blast Off probably was being condescending only unintentionally. Onslaught knew what condescension delivered on purpose from the shuttle looked like and this wasn’t it. < _And it’s a lovely night. We have two days before the contractor moves into place._ > Blast Off continued unexpectedly. < _Why not take your time and enjoy it? There’s nobody around for miles. No outside demands on your attention. Rodion isn’t going anywhere._ >

In his alt mode Onslaught had no shoulders to shrug with so he offered a reply, < _That’s besides the point. I have more important things to do then admire the scenery._ >

< _Enlighten me._ >

< _On?_ >

< _What those more important things are_.>

Blast Off was coasting comfortably along in the skies above him, keeping pace with ease, deliberately slowing himself down to match the speed Onslaught was currently clocking. In root mode, Vortex was the fastest and most acrobatic Combaticon, but in alt mode and given the airspace to maneuver, Blast Off outstriped Vortex by a considerable margin. In an aerial race, Blast Off would blow past Vortex in a sparkbeat each time.

< _Determining how much time we’ll have to vet the site once we arrive. The inadequacies in the contractor’s internal security that will require my correction. There are also a number of well-connected mechs in the city I’d like to touch base with after the job, which means I need to review their weak points and last known locations in advance._ > Onslaught had a suitable level of faith in his team and in himself as their commander. They would complete this job and come back fine, provided Vortex and Brawl didn’t lose the payload between there and Rodion.

But he liked to be prepared.

< _As if you hadn’t already outlined your plans for all of those things before you hit the road_?>

< _You’re accusing my thought process of being predictable_.>

< _I’m accusing you of being too work-oriented._ > Blast Off retorted. He paused. <And _predictable. Live a little. Relax._ >

< _Now you sound like Swindle_.>

 _< That’s uncalled for. I’m not trying to sell you anything to relax with.>_ Blast Off pulled the conversation away from Swindle and back on topic. < _And I know networking is an unavoidable part of business_.>

< _Maybe I’ll ask you to take charge of the plan and set up a luncheon with my associates for me, as a change, Blast Off. Put your experience to work._ >

< _Tsk!_ >

Blast Off lapsed into silence.

The wind whistled.

Onslaught shifted his optical sensors away from Blast Off and towards the plains. Eventually, after the silence had gone on enough without the shuttle either offering another comment or pulling away into the higher reaches of the sky, Onslaught spoke up.

< _What about this scenery do you feel is worth enjoying? It’s hardly a tourist spot._ >

Somewhere on the line of the far horizon, bright dots of light speckled here and there suggested a city.

But aside from that, it was barren.

Blast Off made him wait several minutes before he answered.

 _< There’s no light pollution out here, sir,>_ said Blast Off. < _You can see the stars. We can’t in Tarn. It’s quiet. I like it._ > There was another beat of rumbling engines. < _I presumed you might too._ >

Ah.

It was no wonder Blast Off would take the aerial view.

And yes, Blast Off was correct. One _could_ see the stars wheeling past. It was far from morning. Massive clouds of stars spun across the night to a breathtaking degree that one was blind to elsewhere. The sight pinged old files in Onslaught’s memory banks. The first boot camp the army had sent him to for field training after he’d been rolled off the assembly line. The bunk he’d had in the barracks. Information creep had rubbed away some details into smears but the weather had been like this. Clear and still with no clouds at night or during the day cycle.

 _< It’s a much better view than the smog.>_ Onslaught said.

Blast Off made a clicking noise over the commline, like he was resetting his vocalizer.

< _Yes. Anyway. You have four more hours until you reach the city if you keep going at your current pace_ ,> Blast Off said abruptly. _< I’ll be waiting for you there.>_

Without further adieu Blast Off’s shadow slipped off him, moving ahead. His engines roared and he sped towards the brightness of the city lights shining in the distance and left Onslaught behind on the road below.

**////**

A stack of data storage blocks in his arms, Blast Off left the west wing and walked down the corridor, brushing past support staff. There had been a string of hacker attacks in the headquarters’ sector, and the culprits were still at large and wanted by the enforcers. With how much confidential business information the headquarters’ database housed, their networks could stand to have their data protection doubled and Blast Off was ready to make his case to Onslaught why they should do just that. He’d brought spreadsheets to prove it. Multiple spreadsheets. He had _quantified data_ to back him up.

Vortex ambled past him, three of his rotors swaying jauntily behind his shoulders and one bent, broken-off rotor in his hand, and Blast Off caught the incriminating glimpse of dark blue and green paint rub-offs plastered on his thighs and was that little black streaks on his aft, a dent the size of a handspan crumpling the side of his hip?

Blast Off stopped cold.

He wheeled around to check out Vortex’s rotor hub, and yes—yes, that was definitely paint that didn’t belong to Vortex streaking his top coat.

Add that to the way Vortex skipped away like he’d been about to burst out whistling any moment.

Add that to Vortex coming directly from… the vicinity of Onslaught’s office.

Blast Off reset his optics, shook his helm, turned back around and picked up his pace.

Set beyond an anteroom just off the control center, the office was rigidly organized. A set of small steps divided the room’s wide expanse, ensuring a sense of distance. Stacks of filework and complex diagrams sat next to trays on the desk, one tray labelled for review and another tray labelled for filing away. Two padded chairs were placed in front of the desk, mechanisms for transforming them away into the floor when not in use visible. The shelves were fiercely guarded against dust and so much as a hint of disorder. One shelf recessed into the wall housed small-scale dioramas of historical battles, miniature troops frozen mid-charge in the reenactments. Ceiling-to-floor panoramic (and bulletproof) windows offered a wide view of the city layer the base occupied.

At his desk, Onslaught was typing up something on a computer.

When Blast Off rapped his knuckles on the door frame before he stepped inside, Onslaught immediately waved him in. Blast Off placed the data blocks into a chair before claiming the other chair for himself.

While Onslaught was preoccupied tying up the loose ends on the work order he was writing up before their meeting, Blast Off crossed his legs and covertly studied him. Unlike Vortex, Onslaught didn’t give a single visible hint of dishevelment. His fans weren’t whirring just a little too hard. He was composed and unruffled. His hands were clean. Blast Off then studied the desk between them.

The front of the desk had a patch of fresh cleanser sprayed onto it.

… So fresh in fact, it had probably been applied only minutes before Blast Off had walked in.

As one would do if they wanted to scrub away any leftover paint that had rubbed off the front of a mech after he’d been bent over it, its hard edge digging into the metal of his pelvic span, unable to squirm away, pinned between the unmoving desk on one side and a sturdy mech on the other and—

Blast Off scanned the office again, this time on the alert for anything being left out of place.

Like the half-empty solvent canister shoved behind a row of technical manuals on a shelf.

Against his better judgement, Blast Off’s gaze dropped down to the floor in front of the desk.

It too, shone with the sheen from drying cleaning solvent.

He looked away. What his leader did in the secure privacy of his office and with whom, even if it was with a teammate, was none of Blast Off’s business.

**////**

In the hangar, Blast Off supervised the mechs unloading their illicit cargo from the transport. It was chemical shipments, worth five million so long as their vials remained uncontaminated, packed in under two layers of innocuous energon convertors that had been also ordered by an upstanding private contractor who knew to keep less-than-savory dealings under the table and out of sight. Swindle’s contraband, smuggled into the city under the nose of law enforcement.

As each crate was hauled into the hanger, Blast Off took note of its number, cross-referenced it to the contents it was listed as carrying, and checked it off on his clipboard. Swindle then inspected the shipment to ensure it was still sterilized by clamping a monitoring screen onto the side of the crate, where it locked into place and measured the artificially-controlled temperature and structural integrity of the objects inside. Its mechanisms made ticking noises.

Once it was done analyzing, the results appeared as a series of graphs and numbers on the circular screen. After the crate was deemed in the clear, Swindle pulled the device off and transmitted the findings to Blast Off and Blast Off recorded it by filling in the appropriate boxes. The crate would be hauled away by a worker.

It wasn’t the fastest process, but a single ruined vial would cost Swindle his profit.

The device ticked.

Blast Off tapped a stylus on his clipboard. “And you’re tunnelling it straight through the Fins’ gang turf after this? They take tolls if you’re not affiliated with them. It’ll be rough on the shipments.”

“Shadowhawk’s going to do me a solid, he’ll run interference. And see, it’s like this: as long as I’m not running boosters, since they like to have the black market cornered there, the regulars will take a bribe to look the other way.” Swindle ran a finger along the monitoring device’s rim dreamily, imagining the profit he was going to rack in. Mmm. That sweet, sweet sensation of watching the numbers on his bank account climb upward. “Everybody’s got a price,” Swindle said flippantly. “Anybody who says otherwise is high as a kite or kidding themselves.”

The hubbub created by a pair of workers lifting one of the crates out of the transport, only for one of the workers’ grip to slip and the crate to nearly crash into the floor and break open instantly sidetracked Swindle from talking.

“Whoa, there! _Whoa_. Careful! Careful with the goods! Watch where you put your hands! Do you have any idea how much cost is riding on this!?” Dropping the conversation, Swindle rushed over and railed at them. The worker whose grip had slipped and who had saved the crate from making contact with the floor with a hasty lunge cringed away until Swindle ordered him to go swap duties with another worker.

When Swindle walked back, Blast Off had already recorded the results from the monitoring device and moved onto the next crate.

“Not everybody takes bribes and not everything is for sale,” Blast Off remarked. “But you’re right, mechs like Shadowhawk and his ilk are susceptible to them. You’ll evade the tolls. I don’t doubt that.”

Swindle sported a highly skeptical look on his face.

“You think you’re above bribes?”

“I _know_ I am.” He then amended the statement, “When it counts.”

The corners of Swindle’s mouth slowly curled up. “Huh. Hey, Blasters. Free of charge, I’ll give you some friendly advice.”

Blast Off twisted around to give him a sideways glance over his mask.

“Something free? From _you_?”

“Ya’ want it or not?”

“You wish to share, be my guest.”

“Do yourself a favor, Blast Off. I know you consider yourself above the rest of the unpolished masses, but figure out for yourself what your price is, soon as you can.”

“Or what?”

Swindle laughed. “Or somebody like me is gonna do it for you, and you’ll hate it.”

**////**

In the common room, they sat at a table and talked.

Filing tool in his hand, Blast Off trimmed the pink crystals jutting out of the shallow dish. A handbook on crystal cultivation methods and growth rates laid open in front of him, a cube of energon glowing beside it.

Blast Off didn’t know why Onslaught had chosen to come and spend his refueling break at the table Blast Off was at instead of staying holed up in his office. Onslaught didn’t present any reasons, his field kept close to his armor, and Blast Off didn’t press.

There were worse mechs to refuel with, he supposed.

Onslaught’s processor proved as exacting in discussing the political implications of the Prime’s bill to push stricter regulations on energon refinery production being passed in the Senate as it was at devising battle strategies. They both agreed it was an inadequate measure to address the energy shortages cropping up, a token gesture meant to appease the public rather than fix the problem at the source. Blast Off spoke at length about the bloat and the dithering of the Senate’s nest of subcommittees which further blocked the process of implementing legislation.

A fabrication plant had collapsed in Apophenia, offlining dozens of workers and reruns of the footage had been looping across newscasts for the last two days. The workers’ deactivations might have gone unremarked upon had the collapse not taken the eastern half of the two residential districts layered above down with it.

The chain reaction had spidered itself out from the center of the collapse in a string of fallen support pillars, snapped electric lines, and gaping holes where the streets had once been. They were still digging mechs and the rare grey frame out of the wreckage.

And once it had come out the fabrication plant hadn’t been following safety guidelines and had been cutting costs on maintenance for so long the building had fallen apart under the workers’ feet? The owners had known from reports by inspectors they were at risk of an industrial crash and hadn’t stopped cutting costs, since they hadn’t realized the residential neighborhood above weren’t considered by the public as expendable as the low-class workers were. Reporters had a field day with those leaks.

What had the Senate done in response? Nothing.

They wagged their fingers and gave speeches about tragedy and implored businesses in Apophenia to be less careless of their surroundings and carried on much the same as they had before.

Token gestures.

“They’re cut off from the mechs on the streets,” Onslaught observed. “And this isn’t the capital. What’s a few dozen laborers to them once the public outrage has died down?”

Once they tired of politics, Onslaught, stirring cadmium-flavored additives into his energon with a spoon, mentioned there had been an aviation show in Vos cancelled on short notice. Swindle, who had been planning on attending and rigging the gambling scene on which contestant would place in the top score, was put out over it. He’d gone off in a huff to one of his pawnshops to convince other people to part with the contents of their wallets.

Blast Off nodded along and filed another thin shaving off the crystal he was trimming. He was careful; strike too hard with the tool and crystals cracked. Strike too gently and the tool just glanced off the glossy surface without leaving a mark. Blast Off had a specific form that he wanted to shape this arrangement of crystals into. He preferred to avoid cracks.

The crystals’ primitive field tingled against his fingers.

More pink shavings laid in scattered curls around the dish.

A minor promotion had recently seen Blast Off elevated in the breadth of his responsibilities as an employee. Onslaught asked after how he was handling it and Blast Off told him he was encountering no difficulties in navigating his new position. An idle glance at Onslaught’s posted schedule on the headquarter’s network told him Onslaught’s time after the fuel break would be booked up for the rest of the day, with requisition forms, last-minute calls, meetings with suppliers and maintenance staff crammed into the remaining hours. This was probably the last Blast Off would see of him for a while.

In no hurry to end the fuel break, Blast Off let the conversation wind on.

**////**

On Cybertron, there was no shortage of noises.

Debris creaked. Structures swayed. Engines roared. Electricity sizzled. Alarms beeped. Traffic droned. Toxins bubbled. Power generators whined. Buildings shifted. Gravity lifts whirred. Metal grated and jangled and clinked and clunked. As its inhabitants, Cybertonians were complicated and heavy tons of towering machinery and gears. Crowds of them guaranteed a racket. When a Cybertronian moved, you usually heard it until the Cybertonian in question had stealth mods installed or training. Or both.

Transformation sequences made noises too.

When Onslaught transformed into his alt, he did it in one powerful surge.

But Onslaught had a habit of leaving his turrets as the last parts of his frame to shift into place at the end of the sequence, mechanically clicking them back and forward in small lock-and-loading motions, as if he was checking all was in working order, before hinges and latches settled into their slots and locked them to face the front of his vehicle mode.

The clicks of well-maintained weaponry was barely noticeable.

Yet for no special reason, Blast Off noticed.

And once he had registered the source of the noise, every now and then Blast Off caught himself distractedly following the motions out of the corner of his visor.

(If asked, Blast Off wouldn’t have given an answer to why the tic snagged his attention. It wasn’t unseemly. There were cars that always flipped over onto their backs while transforming, even if they had switched frame models and their new sequence no longer required a backflip. Blast Off had met a stunt airplane who refused to transform unless his first set of arms folded into his chassis two minutes after his second set of arms rotated into their position as his cockpit even if it made his sequence awkward and twice as long as it needed to be, and a data stick who only assumed his alt mode if he was sitting down when he did it.

Everybody had their preferred sequences when it came to using their T-cog. Developing habits was normal.

Unremarkable.)

But Blast Off couldn’t stop.

His gaze kept straying to the backward slide of the polished barrels covering up the recoil springs, then exposing them again as interlocking parts worked and pistoned the main guns back to their position at ready. It was so _briskly_ done, like when Onslaught handled a handheld rifle, that intent concentration, jacking used bullet casings out of the barrel and pushing in the new ammunition after he had run out of rounds and needed to keep shooting at the other mechs on the battlefield.

Nobody noticed Blast Off watching Onslaught from across rooms.

His visor always moved away to look studiously at something else by the time anybody else chanced to turn around and spot him.

**////**

Vortex could be chatty and affable if he wanted to be. Years of associating with him proved that.

It stank of camouflage.

Blast Off didn’t understand how Vortex’s processor worked—but he didn’t need to in order to recognize what Vortex was. Every inch of the mech, under that charming exterior, under that friendly mask, screamed _predator_.

This wasn’t a judgement on Blast Off’s part.

It was an evaluation of a fact.

And it baffled him how long it took some people, even ones who ought to know better, to _notice_.

Feedback was a rock star gone to rust. A long career of scandals, broken sparks, tabloid gossip, and wild days-long concerts trailed behind him like a comet’s tail, curtailed somewhat by the centuries of his vocalizer steadily degrading (despite many extensive surgeries to heal the abused protoform) from what he publicly proclaimed to be overuse in pursuit of his function and what other sources more accurately attributed to illegal substance abuse, and his hasty retirement to save face and become a publicity agent for a bright new singer. He was rich. He had the mansion to prove it. He was still sought after for interviews; the music scene still played pre-recordings of his old music. For a time, he’d had a conjunx.

Feedback’s conjunx was dead.

And the law had failed to bring the murderers to justice.

Feedback wanted vengeance for Powerchord and he was willing to turn outside the law if it would get him the guilty parties’ sparks extinguished. Approaching a small but highly-sought-after mercenary organization was his next step and the money he slapped down in front of them spoke for itself.

The hunt itself was unremarkable.

It was an off-planet mission by the end, taking them from Cybertron to Croteus 10 to the Elba system where Onslaught and Blast Off had to pry the cold spark chambers from the targets’ bodies so they could take them back to Feedback as proof of a contract fulfilled. The Combaticons would have lost their quarries at Croteus 10 when the trail went cold if not for Onslaught uncovering one of the targets had a helper still in the outpost.

They’d paid him a visit.

He had refused to talk. Onslaught had informed him if he wasn’t willing to cooperate, that would be a dreadful shame, and Vortex might have to take him into the next room alone, lock the door, and make him change his mind. The helicopter could be extremely persuasive. Did he have any other friends on the outpost who might come knocking on his door if he didn’t make an appearance in the mess hall tomorrow?

Would they be more inclined to offer up some harmless information?

Something in the way Vortex looked at the helper, red visor glowing serene and bright, made the mech’s optics lose all color. He’d buckled and told them what they wanted to know.

Blast Off thought he had made a wise choice.

As a rule, predators weren’t kind to prey.

**////**

The distant elevator lift announced itself with a ding. Blast Off announced himself with the series of squelching sounds and the muted whirring of gummed-up hydraulics that gave away his stride down the hallway. He slammed the door to the armory shut behind him.

“Argh!”

Being able to count on one hand the number of times he had heard Blast Off raise his voice outside of combat, Onslaught quirked an optical ridge at him.

“You seem… frustrated.”

Blast Off drew up short, not having anticipated Onslaught would be in the armory.

Hot and sticky, his temperature ratcheted up in an embarrassed burst before he cycled a deep vent and pushed air through his vents, cooling his internal systems down. Irrationally bothered anew by Onslaught seeing him in this state, a faint dusting of coolant flushed his cheeks behind his mask. Blast Off’s mouth worked wordlessly.

Then he recovered and plowed ahead.

“Vortex got a new glue gun,” Blast Off gritted out, scraping at the gunk coating one of his shoulders. “And Brawl thought it was okay to get me involved in the crossfire!” He turned away, temperature starting to climb again. He grabbed the sink’s faucet (the sink was intended to be used for cleaning weapons and there was no soap on hand that would be kind to a mech’s nanite colonies but a wash was a wash, and Blast Off was not walking around in public like this an instant longer than he had to) and twisted it.

Solvent gushed out.

“I have a distinct recollection of having banned Vortex from using those.” Onslaught planted his hands on his hips.

“Did you? Then he judged violating the ban more rewarding than the punishment.”

Onslaught grunted, resisting the urge to sigh and pinch his nose between his fingers. “What I’m hearing is that I’m going to have to show him he’s made an error in _judgement_.”

Embarrassment ebbing away, Blast Off dunked his helm under the cold spray from the sink. He scrubbed at the gunk crusted onto his neck cabling with both hands. “Good. Best of luck pinning Vortex down long enough for floor-scrubbing duty.” Brawl wouldn’t be a problem. But Vortex was a pain in the aft to catch for his misdeeds unless he wanted to be caught. Bent over, Blast Off offlined his optics, letting the solvent bubble and stream down the flanges of his helm and drip off his chin.

Vortex and Brawl were in the midst of an argument.

Vortex had insulted Brawl. Stupidly, Brawl had given him exactly the reaction he was aiming for, and Vortex had dodged the punches Brawl had thrown at him when the tank had realized Vortex had been unkindly making light of him.

Then Vortex had made matters worse by sneaking up on Brawl later and nailing him in the back with his glue gun. A salesmech zeroing in on a target, Swindle had sidled over while a gunk-splattered Brawl was raging and howling and blindly casting about for a helicopter to throttle and suggested hey now, wouldn’t Brawl like to give Vortex a taste of his own medicine? He’d even toss in an upgrade that he knew for a _fact_ Vortex’s gun didn’t have and give Brawl the edge on his teammate.

Caught up in his anger, Brawl was not canny enough to question why Swindle conveniently already had a glue gun for sale the moment that Brawl might want one. He had forked over the credits without a second thought. The next time he spied Vortex, Vortex had received a shot of foul-smelling glue straight in the optics, a gift courtesy of Brawl’s equally foul mood.

Matters had rapidly escalated to violence from there, greased along by Swindle.

Blast Off, personally, thought they were behaving like idiot newsparks who needed a protobatch initiator to mind them and told them so.

He stayed well out of it.

Then Brawl had mistaken him for Vortex right as Blast Off rounded a corner in a hallway in the base.

“I have my ways,” said Onslaught. “If they’re going to fling glue around, they’re going to clean it up.”

“Get Swindle too. He’s supplying both of them.”

“He’s not wiggling out either.”

Pulling his helm out from the spray, shaking it so droplets flew off, Blast Off straightened up from the sink with a grumble, rolling his shoulders back, and looked about for a towel to wipe off with. Turning around, his outstretched hand nearly collided with Onslaught’s hand.

Blast Off reset his optics: Onslaught was holding out a towel to him, a little dirtied with gun oil but perfectly serviceable. Blast Off locked up in place, suddenly absurdly grateful that his mask concealed his expression at being caught off guard. He hadn’t noticed when Onslaught had moved closer.

“Here,” said Onslaught, completely oblivious to the sudden influx of heat rushing through Blast Off’s frame. “You still need to clean off your legs. And your shoulder.”

Forcing his joints to unlock, Blast Off looked down at his legs.

“Right. I do.”

Then he took the towel and dried his helm off.

**////**

It wouldn’t occur to Blast Off until many years later to articulate this about this period in his life, but—

He was, for lack of a better word, content.

Life had its ups and its downs. Onslaught, Vortex, Swindle, and Brawl were all nuisances. Blast Off went up and stayed in orbit when he reached his limits and they got to be too much for his patience, even if he had to dodge the satellites, probes, and assorted garbage (and other shuttles) floating around and fouling up the space there. But Blast Off returned to the same place from where he had left when he came streaking back down through the upper atmosphere.

Tarn was a dirty place. It was still where the headquarters were. Where his apartment was.

Gradually Blast Off stopped thinking about his intentions to not get attached and to keep an exit route close at hand for the day when Onslaught’s mercenary band broke apart, an ending that was in store for most organizations on a sufficiently long time scale. He stopped thinking about escape. Life fell into an untroubled pattern.

Appreciation for others that went further than casual tolerance was new.

It was strange, how little Blast Off minded the novelty of it.

**////**

Once, after Onslaught had gotten shot in the arm during a job where he had taken to the field instead of staying behind and remotely coordinating the operation from their headquarters like he preferred to, he had pulled out a roll of bandages and sat in Blast Off’s cabin up on the flight deck afterwards, and Blast Off had kept an optic on him through his onboard cameras (not that he took all of his attention away from the coordinate grid he was using to navigate and avoid air traffic, that would be too careless—he was already dividing it further between telling Brawl to stop yelling and ignoring Vortex’s requests that they play the poorly-synthetized assault on the audials he called music on Blast Off’s speakers; Swindle was the teammate who behaved himself and read a datapad) and blandly reminded him to buckle in and to do his best to not bleed on the cushions.

Wrapping long strips of nanite patches around his arm, Onslaught grunted an affirmative.

Sparks jumped off a torn wire.

It was by chance the laser had burnt through a gap in the outer plating and struck an energon line.

Blast Off was certain it looked worse than it was in reality. Onslaught was in no danger of bleeding out.

Energon leaked over blue metal.

Military blues and greens weren’t traditionally regarded by society as the most alluring colors out there, but Blast Off found himself conceding the combination had more appeal than he rated it as having in the past. It was… Solid. Firm. Reassuring instead of being gaudy and attention-grabbing like paintjobs that featured glittering scarlet and pearly white and were so favored by the upper class. It wasn’t fancy and it didn’t need to be.

And just like the bright pink of energon smeared across it, the rare glimpses of purple and yellow blocks scattered on Onslaught’s frame served as an optic-catching contrast to the swarth of cool colors.

**////**

In the courtyard of the information broker’s residence, a multi-tiered fountain gushed oil, ringed by a shallow seating bench. This deep into the homecombed corridors and warrens of the city levels, natural light was absent. The small square was lit by lamp posts in the corners that shone yellow and gauzed the spaces behind the support pillars and the upstairs galleries and the staircases into dim crannies with plenty of edges to bounce the light off until they were a canvas of darkened orange and dappled shadows.

It was there that Blast Off found Swindle and Vortex.

Vortex was teetering on one leg, both arms stretched out into the air. Blast Off was privately impressed by the sturdiness of his balance (not that he’d say so aloud)—only the _occasional_ wobble, despite Vortex’s helm being tilted backwards so he could balance a soda can on his mask. And two dishes and a teacup stacked on his left hand. And a bottle and a drinking cube on his left arm.

“What in the name of Vector Sigma are you two doing?”

Swindle was trying to place a dish on Vortex’s outstretched foot. “Winning a bet.”

“Making myself sixty credits richer and Swindle so much poorer!” Vortex crackled.

Blast Off inquired, “What sort of bet involves this? Did you bet Vortex he couldn’t balance twenty items on his helm or are you trying to time how long he can tolerate looking like a circus act?”

“Sixteen items,” Swindle corrected him. “ _Without_ dropping one, for at least ten minutes, or it’ll turn out Vortex’s boasting is just him blowing hot air.”

“And if Swindle tries to push me over so I don’t get his credits, I get to cut his face off for trying to cheat! Or an optic. Haven’t made up my mind yet. Hey, Swindle, which one are you less attached to? Your optic or your face? I’d love to get my fingers in your optic socket. I’d be nice about it. You could pick right or left!”

Swindle was unphased.

“I’m attached to both. I don’t need to cheat for this. You’ll drop something before I get to ten items and then _I’ll_ be the one forty credits richer.”

Vortex wobbled in place.

“I’m already thinking about the present that I’ll be buying myself with your money,” Vortex snipped.

Dish balanced precariously on Vortex’s foot, Swindle stepped back and snagged a cube off the pile he had stacked up on the bench. None of the items in the clutter looked like they belonged to Swindle. Blast Off had seen energon being served less than an hour ago in teacups identical to the teacup on Vortex’ left arm in the lobby by the district information broker’s assistants.

He didn’t say anything about it.

“You two are immature,” Blast Off huffed at their squabbling and sat down on the bench around the bubbling fountain. Vortex and Swindle were a strange thing. One day they would be at each other’s intakes, bristling and hackles raised, another day they would be as thick as thieves, scheming up shenanigans that were legally suspect at best.

“Your insight cuts me to the core, Blasters, it honestly does,” Vortex said, unconcerned. “Without a stick-in-the-mud like you to scoff at people who want to have fun, who knows where we’d be.”

“I don’t see how expecting a modicum of self-discipline makes me a stick-in-the-mud,” Blast Off retorted. “Is this balancing act a thing you practiced or does it come natural?”

Swindle stuck the cube on top of the teacup.

“Yeah. Vortex, were you an outlier this whole time and didn’t tell us?”

“If I was an outlier, I’d have a much cooler ability than this! Like being able to turn invisible or shoot lasers out of my visor.” Vortex’s arm dipped. The cube and the teacup shuddered, sliding closer to the edge of the dish they were stacked atop. Vortex corrected his balance and tipped his arm up. The cube and the teacup slide away from the edge instead of falling off. Vortex flicked his rotors. “You’d be amazed at the kind of party tricks you can pick up.”

“Why this one?” Swindle asked. Blast Off fished an empty bottle out of the pile and turned it over in his hands. Then he handed it to Swindle.

Vortex’s response was glib.

“I was bored. It got me free extra drinks.”

_I was bored._

Three words you didn’t want to hear coming out of Vortex’s vocalizer.

Vortex when he was too bored was a hazard. But as far as things Vortex had done solely because he wanted entertainment went, a random party trick was one of his least messy.

**////**

When Onslaught bent over at a good angle, Blast Off’s interface equipment jolted. It jumped online and took notice, lazily pinging him with non-urgent activation requests. And that was what it took for things to click together for its owner. The source of the heat that rose up in his chest when he looked at Onslaught flagged itself as unspent charge. On the other side of the glass pane that let Blast Off look down from the observation deck onto the firing range, Onslaught and Brawl were competing to see who could hit the most targets: Brawl had knocked something onto the floor and now Onslaught was straightening back upright after picking it up.

Putting down his datapad and propping his chin onto his palm, elbow resting on the table, Blast Off re-considered Onslaught in a new light that it had never occurred to him to consciously view the truck in.

Hmm.

Well.

For a grounder, he _was_ attractive.

Handsome was the word that came to mind.

Big arms, broad shoulders and plenty of corners and sharp angles that accented the assets of a wide chest and bulky thighs. And nice tires. All features worth appreciating. And he masked his face. Blast Off had a marked preference for visors and masks. There was just... _something_ to the visuals of a featureless faceplate and the cover of a visor that got to him.

It was a nice view.

Before this Blast Off had liked to look. No big deal. But now he realized that his wants had progressed and he just didn’t like the idea of looking—he liked the idea of _touching_. His hands on warm metal. All that clean polished plating, and pleasingly rectangular to boot—and the looks came paired with a mech capable of holding an intelligent conversation—it made one’s thoughts go straight to wallowing in the gutter.

An image of Onslaught’s strong hands patting and stroking him all over got his fans whirring softly to life. Alone on the observation deck, there was nobody else around to hear. Blast Off’s visor dimmed. He really, really wanted it. He wanted to touch.

Down in the shooting range, Brawl destroyed three targets in a row and looked to be evidently gloating.

Having briefly gotten lost in the daydream, Blast Off shook himself out of it.

On one hand, very well. Onslaught was good-looking and the mixture of what Blast Off had mistaken for irritation and embarrassment that had recently left Blast Off so out-of-sorts when they were in the same vicinity had unveiled itself as merely a slow-burning interest. That was a relief. Blast Off had been at a loss to explain why nothing about Onslaught’s own behavior had changed noticeably and yet soaked up so much of his attention.

Except now that he had figured out the real cause, Blast Off couldn’t get his processor out of the gutter. On the shooting range, Onslaught hit the center of a target. Blast Off’s interface equipment pinged him again.

On the other hand, Onslaught was his employer and he had been for years.

It wasn’t worth jeopardizing his position just for a frag.

Blast Off had no desire to complicate their current working relationship with unprofessionalism.

The shuttle sighed and activated a manual override, shutting off his fans.

… But just because Blast Off wasn’t going to do anything didn’t mean he couldn’t look and admire. Casually. Privately.

**////**

It was a thrill to have a secret.

It was his secret to hold close to his chest, just for him and him alone to savor. Nobody suspected a thing. It was a game made all the richer for the secrecy and Blast Off didn’t need another player to indulge in it. He didn’t plan to act on his desires. He had his fantasies when he laid down to recharge for the night. They were fun and purposefully unrealistic.

 _I know something you don’t_ , he thought at Onslaught as he stood at attention in a briefing. It made him feel smug and disobedient.

Blast Off had no urge to push it further than that.

**////**

“So we’re picking a side?” Blast Off asked, leaning against the doorframe of Onslaught’s office with his arms folded across his chestplates. It was dark outside. The neon glow of the streetlights and aerial beacons streaming in through the window laid in thin strips across the floor. The traffic lanes outside buzzed along.

Onslaught’s visor gleamed. “If you have objections, speak up now.”

“Vortex thinks we could go neutral,” Blast Off said.

“And you? What do you think?”

“I think it’s not a bad idea. Your plan is sound, but staying uncommitted to either side is safer. It can’t hurt to hedge our bets.” Blast Off’s tailfin twitched from side to side. “We have a good base of operations here in Tarn. Moving it like you proposed has its risks.”

Onslaught leaned back in his chair. “Blast Off, we need to adapt to changing circumstances. Sometimes that requires risk. And we can build a new base. We have the resources.”

“Sir, you’re putting the ship before the launch sequence,” Blast Off countered. “We could rebuild, but do we need to put ourselves in a situation where we have to do so in the first place? Maybe giving up our arrangements here will pay off. But what if it doesn’t?”

Onslaught gave the impression of frowning at him.

“I didn’t decide on a whim. This is the course of action with the highest probability of success in the long run.” Onslaught said. “The chances of it backfiring in any way that impacts us too badly are _miniscule_. I anticipate that I can easily maneuver around them.”

Blast Off ex-vented. He walked over to the desk.

“I’m not doubting your calculations, but we can offer our support to the side we favor _without_ uprooting and moving our entire operation to Kaon,” Blast Off put a hand flat on the desk. “Shouldn’t that be pay off enough? What do you believe the others think about this?”

Onslaught folded his hands together, fingers linked. “I’m aware Brawl is clamouring and rearing for the Decepticons, and Swindle sees them as a booming new customer market.” Onslaught’s stern tone turned wry. “He’s already aiming for an ‘in’ with the leader.”

Swindle had been their accidental pipeline into the Decepticons.

To be accurate, he had sold Brawl a collection of illegal pit holovids, which Brawl had proceeded to tear through with relish before sharing them with Vortex which Vortex had loved just because of the amount of carnage and spilled energon on gruesomely vivid display. Vortex had told Onslaught about them and Onslaught mentioned them to Blast Off who had rolled his optics at the bloodsports, and Onslaught had promptly forgotten about the holovids until the very gladiator in those started broadcasting calls for both action and new metal for his movement. And then he had remembered.

Events had spun out from there.

“Megatron…” Blast Off said. “Why am I not surprised Swindle would want him as a steady customer? That’s a mech who will be making Cybertron’s arms dealers very, very happy soon. Still… We don’t need Megatron and these Decepticons.”

And Onslaught agreed with him.

“No. We don’t _need_ them. But the Decepticons are on the rise. We might as well present them with a reason to look favorably upon us.”

Blast Off paused.

“Do you believe Megatron’s promised uprising will happen? Why?”

“The Senate’s hopelessly out of touch. They can’t maintain power like they have forever. The vultures are gathering. Anybody with a functioning processor can see that. If one of those vultures is going to catapult himself to the top, why wouldn’t it be Megatron?” Onslaught asked. “Unlike the others, his support base grows stronger with each passing month.”

“Numbers aren’t the end-all, be-all.”

“Nor is popularity. But neither should be discredited.”

“I’m your second in command!” Blast Off huffed. “I have a right to be heard.”

“And you will be.”

“Then listen to me and Vortex. Neutrality will serve us better than throwing in our lot with the Decepticons. We needn’t commit,” Blast Off argued. “Their cause is admirable, but the tactics are crude.”

“Admirable? I don’t care if their cause is right or wrong.” Onslaught shrugged and stood up. Everything about him in the way he moved spoke of poise and confidence, no wasted energy or gestures. He walked away from the desk to stand in front of the windows. Picking up on the unspoken cue, Blast Off moved around the desk and followed after him to stand near his right shoulder. “I have no lost love for the Senate nor the Functionists, that’s true. If Megatron wishes to put either down, more power to him. That’s commendable. The status quo is corrupt. It could use some burning.

“But my concern remains, as ever, seeing to it that the Combaticons are on the winning side,” Onslaught said. “And by all appearances, the Decepticons will give us mercenaries a warmer welcome than the one we would have found at the Autobots.”

The sardonic flare of contempt across his field betrayed that Blast Off thought poorly of the Decepticons, but he thought even more lowly of the Autobots.

“I wouldn’t have joined that jumped-up Senate security force if they had begged us to sign up on their hands and knees anyway.”

“Neither would I.”

Blast Off fell silent for a long moment.

Then he released a ventilation.

“You’re sure about this then?”

“I am,” Onslaught said. “I understand and I appreciate you voicing your concerns to me. I have weighed the benefits of remaining neutral as well. I’m aware there are many, and if we commit to a side, that action will come with drawbacks.” Onslaught had stayed up late for many nights, picking apart plan after plan of what to do, running countless tactical scenarios. The truck looked out the window to the city spread out in front of it, then back at Blast Off. “In the end I felt we would have to either go off-planet or go to the Decepticons. You know which option I picked. This isn’t a decision I made lightly.”

“Of course not,” Blast Off acknowledged. “You wouldn’t gamble carelessly with the team like that.”

Onslaught beckoned Blast Off closer.

“There’s a war coming,” Onslaught said.

“And we’re going to profit from it.”

Onslaught flashed Blast Off a warm look. “Exactly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In IDW there are mechs who joined the Decepticons purely for their ideals. The Combaticons weren’t among their number.


	3. people like to think war means something

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Are you acknowledging the Autocracy trilogy exists, for real?” Well, I’m not into it either so I’m not precisely happy about having to include it but it’s the only source in the comics for what the IDW Combaticons were up to around the early days. Fair warning: references to police brutality, jokes in poor taste, and torture occur in this chapter.

Sentinel Prime was dead.

The Decepticons took Kaon for theirs, and Zeta Prime and the New Senate rose up to assume Sentinel’s place in opposing the Decepticon movement. But nobody had thought the trouble would last more than three thousand years or so. The terrorists wouldn’t be able to unseat the government, not just by seizing control over one city-state, the more cynical voices murmured. The more optimistic crowd claimed it would obviously all blow over in a few centuries, just as surely as the great minds working in the workshops and the orbital laboratories would come up with a solution to the crisis that was the dwindling stores of energon before things got _too_ bad.

Things would be better under Zeta.

There would be progress.

There would be safety.

They continued saying this as the racetracks and the sports stadiums joined the growing list of industries getting shut down and the hot spots went cold and dark and the prices at the fuel depots inched higher, and the Clampdown’s spies buzzed in the sky.

The Combaticons were hardly bereft of things to do.

Kolkular was being reconstructed into a fortress by Megatron and the Constructicons, and the nearby gladiator pits were full of entertainment and bloodshed.

Violence was the way of business and business was doing splendidly.

When Swindle helped himself to a shipment of heavy-duty plasma mines that had been waylaid before it reached the government armory it had been intended for, and dashed off to peddle it to one of the terrorist cells, none of the Combaticons had paid it any real mind. Swindle’s back-alley bartering and dealing was just background noise. What Swindle couldn’t scam out of somebody, he tended to outright steal if what he was after wasn’t physically nailed down.

Following his example, Brawl had swiped one mine for himself. Onslaught brushed over Swindle’s complaint over the private team channel about the theft and informed that him one measly mine was hardly going to cut into his profits and to stop bothering him with trivial problems when Onslaught was haggling with the owner of the Jump Joint to get Vortex un-banned from the bar after the incident two days ago. Vortex and Blast Off hadn’t been there at all, since they had been recruited into aerial formation drilling with the rest of the Decepticon’s air forces.

So Swindle was the first one of them to get into serious trouble, almost purely by accident.

He took the shipment to Nyon.

And days later, Nyon blew skyhigh.

Zeta’s madness needed no further pretext.

Outside the Prime’s citadel, the fighting raged on as the Decepticons and Orion Pax’s forces attacked the Prime’s loyalists in waves. Somewhere far above, Megatron and Orion Pax were taking down Zeta.

But to an assault team forcing their way past the cover fire on them from the gun emplacements and into the thick of the fighting spilling into the underground corridors, that was of secondary concern. Blast Off had already emptied his fourth load of troops into his designated drop-zone, so he had been free to join up with the squad Vortex was leading inside. He would serve as the means for a quick retreat once their objective was obtained.

Onslaught and Brawl were outside, in one of the battalions charging across the combat zone flanking the far side of the complex. Vortex and Blast Off were looking for their teammate and they didn’t intend to leave until they found him.

The chaos of battle was the perfect cover.

“Roadblock. Heavy Load. Take the right wing,” Vortex yanked a blade out of a greying frame that steamed as it rapidly cooled down, bright drops of energon flying off the edge and pointed it down the hallway. “Blackwall, you and Headstrong, storm the second level and open the cells. Me and Blast Off will deal with the third and fourth levels. Move out!”

There was a chorus of acknowledgment.

Smoke billowed out of another corridor’s mouth as they passed it. They ignored it, passing through what might’ve been some sort of conference room. Toppled tables, broken chairs. Used cubes knocked to the floor. Blaster marks scarring the walls. The signs of struggle. They kept going. There, the stairs; the door in front of it had already been battered down, crumpled from repeated blows. The assault team split up. The two Combaticons raced along in the red light of the forcefields of the detention cells.

If the prisoners they spotted inside weren’t their teammate, they didn’t pause to free them.

That would be Blackwall’s job.

Blast Off and Vortex plunged down deeper.

Occupied cell, occupied cell, empty cell, occupied cell, occupied cell, empty cell, empty cell, empty cell, occupied cell, occupied cell, empty cell.

“Soundwave’s intel was limited, but they have _got_ to have him stashed away in here _somewhere_ ,” Blast Off kicked a piece of debris out of the way. Another empty cell, energon splattered in an arc across the floor. A guard lunged at them; Blast Off put two neat holes in his chest. He dropped to the floor, greying.

“If they haven’t already killed him,” snarled Vortex darkly, stepping over the body.

“In Soundwave’s report, Swindle wasn’t greyed out even after the wretched Prime used that weapon on him! He’s Swindle, he can smooth-talk his way out of the Pit. He’ll be okay. We just need to _find_ him.”

The floor shook faintly under their feet as Seekers made another bombing run outside. Dust rained down.

Vortex cast a look up at the ceiling, “Better hurry up.”

Blast Off gripped his gun tighter.

They found him on the fifth underground level, in one of the cells near the stairs.

The lump slumped in a shadowy corner at the back of the cell lurched upright at the noises as Vortex mowed down another guard, peering in their direction before slowly dragging himself into the path of the lighting. Blast Off couldn’t blame his lack of speed or his caution in trying to identify them on visual data alone. There wasn’t a lot that Swindle could have done to hide that he had been questioned before being hauled back into the cell, acquiring a new set of dents from the rough handling by the Prime’s security forces.

Blast Off could make out the bright, brassy gleam of circuit boards in his front. Wires protruded from where his armor was torn open and one of his optics was smashed in. The other was reduced to a dimmed purple dot peering out of a black mass of exposed machinery, the silicon mesh on one side of his face gone. The white of his denta was visible.

“Guys?” Swindle croaked.

“It’s us,” Blast Off called through the barrier.

Knees buckling, Swindle sat down hard on the cell floor. “Argh. Primus. Took your sweet time! Be faster about it next time. If I had to spend another day with these spawns of glitches’ ugly mugs up in my face, I was going to go binary.”

Blast Off just snorted. “Do _try_ to contain your overwhelming appreciation. We only had to fight through a _small_ army to get here, after all.”

Blast Off guarded the door and fired down the corridor at anybody with the Senate’s brand on their chest that approached. His shots connected, eliciting screams. Vortex briskly checked Swindle’s readouts and made sure he’d survive getting rescued. Vortex knew how the interrogation of prisoners went. Which weak points would be targeted. And he knew what to look for to patch up afterwards. He was the closest thing the Combaticons had to an on-team medic.

 _Plink. Plink_. Something was dripping out of Swindle, trickling down the recesses of the inside plating of his leg and hitting the cell floor.

 _Plink. Plink. Plink_.

While Vortex was busting out the field medkit from his subspace to tend to that, Blast Off contacted Onslaught.

< _Swindle has been located and secured per your orders, sir._ >

< _Good. What’s his status?_ >

Keeping his gun cocked and held at the ready, Blast Off stole a glance behind him into the cell; Vortex was hefting up Swindle’s leg in his claws and clinically turning it from side to side, where it looked like his knee had been smashed in with a hammer. The gears were busted. Swindle clicked and made discomforted noises, the ragged edges of his field filled with pain and oily fear. Blast Off looked away, hand cupping his audial.

< _Alive. Severely drained of energon. Unfit for active combat unless pushed, unfortunately_.>

< _Unfortunate, but unsurprising,_ > Onslaught said coldly and pinged him a data transmission. < _Collect whatever wounded on our side you can locate on your way out and extract Swindle ASAP. Take him to these coordinates. There will be medical attention for him there. Then rejoin the fighting. Astrotrain’s unit could use more aerial back-up_.>

< _Roger that, sir!_ >

Blast Off cut the comm and returned his attention to the going-ons inside the cell. Vortex slapped nanite patches onto Swindle’s surface wounds.

“—So who was the one that worked on your face? It’s a pretty sight. Wanna slag ‘em after we take over this dump?” Vortex was asking.

“Busted it before they started asking me questions. Orion Pax has one Pit of a right hook,” Swindle said. Mechanisms around his broken optic spiraled wide, then shrank it to a pinpoint of purple again. Behind his mask Blast Off mouthed to himself _Orion Pax again_? Hadn’t Swindle had enough run-ins with that cop? “I didn’t give ‘em nothin’ useful on us.” Swindle was pale and shaky with prolonged energon loss, and his functional optic was unfocused. “Just scrap. Outdated codes. Names they already knew. Jobs we already wrapped up. Scrap. I didn’t give ‘em what they wanted. Nothing. Slagged them off.”

Vortex moved on to stuffing Swindle’s dangling circuit boards back into the large gash Swindle was sporting across his chest.

Noticing Swindle starting to lapse towards unconsciousness, Blast Off said. “Stay awake. We’re not out of danger yet.”

“Didn’t give…”

“Shush, Blasters. Sure, yeah. The higher ups will be happy about that. They don’t want information leaks, not now. But going and selling to sadsacks like the crowd in Nyon, Swin? That’s just risky business,” Vortex said. “It was too close to Autobot territory. Put you in their reach.”

Swindle whined. “They were desperate. Desperate people are good customers. Shell out like no tomorrow… Great deals. For me. And them. If they like plasma mines, that is. That’s what they got out of it. Plus, they’re easy marks for Decepticon recruitment...”

“In other words, you saw an opportunity to score credits by selling stolen bombs and drum up support for the cause,” Blast Off summarized. “And you didn’t outrun the cops fast enough when they busted it.”

“Are you _judging_ me? Right now?”

“ _Usually_ , you’re much smarter about wiggling away from law enforcement than _that_. You’ve done it thousands of times before. Don’t give me that tone. It’s not an insult. You were sloppy and that concerns me. It’s unlike you.”

“What Blast Off means is,” Vortex interrupted. “Did you decide mouthing off at the cop beating you up in public was more important than making a clean getaway?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Swindle shook his head, the exposed mechanisms on his cheek grinding. “I’d like you to see you make a quick escape when a cop in Onslaught’s weight class is whalloping the living’ spark outta’ you, right into the pavement!”

Outside the cell, Blast Off’s engine gave a rumble. “Oh. Swindle… A big, brutal cop the size of Onslaught? Vortex would enjoy that far too much to try and _escape_.”

Swindle reset his optics, lips twitching.

Then he burst in a fit of hacking laughter.

Vortex stopped patching up the last wounds on Swindle and clapped a hand to his chest, rotors jerking straight upright to point towards the ceiling, playing offense at the bad joke. “Are you implying I’d find the idea of mechs abusing their positions of power over others kinky? My own teammate? Unbelievable. I’ll have you know I’d have better taste in ‘bots than to get that kink scratched by a Senate thug before I shove a knife in their spark and make ‘em scream.” That only made Swindle laugh harder, oil and energon still drying in a discolored pink crust down one of his legs. The noise was edging towards hysterical. Blast Off’s back tailfin flicked.

“Say what you want, but make sure we can get going soon. Onslaught’s ordered us to finish the extraction and pull out.”

Swindle swallowed down a snicker and nodded.

The floor trembled under their feet again. Metallic dust rained down in small, trailing plumes. Vortex snapped his field medkit shut and tapped Swindle on the forehead. “You’ll be fine, just dial down your pain sensitivity,” He helped Swindle to his feet. To Blast Off he said, “I’m seeing the beginnings of rust infection setting in. Let’s move.”

Picking up Headstrong (minus one arm, his right audial and most of his shoulder) and two Decepticon grunts on the way, Blast Off toted them off the active frontlines and back to where the medics had set up a temporary triage center. Vortex gripped Swindle by the shoulder and steered him towards a medic, vanishing into the crowd. The other Decepticons climbed off the shuttle after them.

Blast Off lifted off and shot back into the fray. Vortex would rejoin the fun in his own time.

The night melted into nothing but the rattle of gunfire and engines shrieking.

When the gunfire had died down and morning eventually seeped past the rim of the horizon in a pale cold gleam that touched the tops of buildings and illuminated the edges of shattered window sills in yellow, a singed-looking Dirge broke away from the rest of his trine’s formation and landed next to where the Combaticons were grouped together in one of the open courtyards. He transformed in a rush of flashing parts into his root mode. Moments later, Thrust and Ramjet touched down and went straight to the one remaining non-broken bench and proceeded to start arguing over who got to sit on it instead of the ground. They had just finished a patrol and Dirge had news to share.

“Megatron’s disposed of Orion Pax,” Dirge said. “Zeta’s dead. Iacon is now in the hands of the Decepticons, just like Kaon. And from there, the planet will be too.”

Brawl slammed his fists together. “Yo, THAT’S more like it! Cybertron’s ours!”

“As it should be,” Blast Off said, perched with his legs primly crossed in front of him on a chunk of rubble. He approved.

“Lord Megatron will broadcast our victory on the network,” Dirge told them.

“But there’s still some loose ends to be taken care of.” Onslaught snapped a new round of ammunition into the barrel of the blaster resting in his lap. “I don’t imagine Megatron’s forgotten that.”

Megatron hadn’t.

Along with Brawl, Blast Off was tasked with clearing out what Autobot stragglers they could find in the sector while Onslaught went to handle the duties that came with the rank of unit commander. It was tedious work.

Afterwards, Blast Off visited Swindle in the medbay in the citadel.

Systems patched onto pain dampeners and on an energon drip to replace the amount he’d lost, Swindle was too delirious and out of it to fully grasp what was going around him. He muttered and twitched, field twisted up.

Blast Off lingered by his berth and adjusted the glowing tubes feeding into Swindle’s lines and rearranged his limbs, trying to make the con-mech more comfortable. Swindle was hurting. Blast Off tried to ease that, so long as Swindle wasn’t conscious to notice and comment. He offered no words and no touches besides that. After-battle activity hummed around them, now that the initial rush of the patients had petered off. Miscellaneous noises: the clinking of metal against steel, a mumbled complaint below a medic’s normal vocal range as they shuffled their filework back in order after they slipped out, and the dull creaks and shallow venting of mechs in pain.

**////**

They hadn’t won the war because Orion Pax wasn’t as dead as Megatron thought.

A new Prime.

 _Just_ what they didn’t need.

Optimus Prime called up a Titan out of the myths, because of course he could. Not every Titan had flown away into the stars like people had believed.

The Decepticons lost Iacon and retreat.

Blast Off listened to the news broadcast the Autobots had going of Optimus Prime’s latest speech, interpersed with the background noise of Brawl growling at length to Onslaught about ‘fraggin’ Dinobots’ and ‘their stupid long-range flamethrowers,’ and scoffed. Let the Autobots dress up the reason all they wanted. Blast Off had a theory about war and it went something like this: wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. The Senate had thought they would win, Zeta thought he would win, Megatron thought he was going to win, Optimus Prime thought he was going to win.

**////**

Things corrode from there. Little flare-ups. Skirmishes. Riots. Energon shortages get more common. More severe. More mecha go hungry. Neutrals start receiving much worse than unpleasant comments. Crude insignias are found graffitied across the sides of buildings even in upscale neighborhoods with guards on patrol. Mechs go missing in the night. Rage boiled over into fights. This was nothing new. Sides are defined now. Lines are drawn.

Violence was like a rust infection gone rampant. It itched. It ate through every circuit.

It spread across the planet.

The planet was entering its downward spiral.

Open war erupted on Cybertron.

**////**

When it happened, Onslaught responded to Scorponok’s coup with contempt, which he was keen to express in private to Blast Off. It wasn’t the _coup_ he objected to; it was who had led it.

“Scorponok isn’t a military leader,” Onslaught scoffed. “Megatron has his faults, but at least he understands how to run an armed revolt. Scorponok’s a scientist playing at warfare. He doesn’t see _soldiers_ , just subjects to tinker with. It’s a waste of good resources. He’ll never lead the Decepticons to victory.”

Blast Off nodded. “You’re right.” It was an agreement delivered calmly. “We wanted to join an army, not a free-for-all. So what are we going to do about it?”

“If it comes down to it? If the current leadership doesn’t improve?” Onslaught turned and looked down at the lines of Decepticons unenthusiastically drilling maneuvers in the training yard. “We’ll leave them to tear each other apart, like Scorponok’s fool enough to _want_.” He paused. “We’ll be prepared, Blast Off. I wouldn’t permit us to be offlined for the sake of an idiot’s games.”

Blast Off’s visor was a slash of unblinking purple across his face.

“We’ll be ready for your signal.”

Scorponok’s leadership didn’t improve.

So the Combaticons were one of the first groups to desert in broad daylight.

They loaded up into a starship they’d looted as part of their spoils from a freshly-conquered Helex (days after they had acquired it, Swindle bet the starship away while gambling on his off shift with Drag Strip and Wildrider—the threat of Onslaught penalizing him had sent him hurrying back to reclaim it via another round of gambling, this time properly rigged in his favor; Drag Strip and Wildrider hadn’t seemed too bothered by the loss, but then again, neither of them were pilots and it was hardly like they knew how to drive anything that wasn’t attached to the ground) because Blast Off had informed them that he was willing to shuttle them around on missions, military operations, and off-planet, but if they were going to be _living_ off-planet full-time, they had better find an alternative or Blast Off would be highly displeased and make sure all of them knew it.

To spare themselves that, they were taking the starship.

The starship launched away from Cybertron and into space with Blast Off in the pilot’s seat.

The galaxy was a starry wasteland that was more void than it was anything else, despite the wide variety of species living in it. Those species were usually no different than Cybertronians in their willingness to pay enormous amounts of credits for heavily-armed mercenaries to do what they wanted. The Combaticons swung by Hedonia first, stocking up on supplies and new weapons before hitting the border sectors of deep space. The systems policed heavily by the Galactic Council were more trouble than they were worth for the moment, so they breezed onto the Stenarian region and took a contract with an Ammonite squadron running a stronghold on one of their homeworld’s moons.

That was profitable for several months, even if Vortex wasn’t pleased about taking orders from mechanisms the height of his knee. Swindle sold them every Decepticon secret he wasn’t keeping in reserve for later and several Autobot dirty details too, just for the extra credits.

Then a Terradore battalion wiped out the stronghold. The Combaticons piled back onto the starship and disappeared into space once the chances of their employers paying them for their loyalty dropped to zero.

The team bounced around between planets.

The downtimes between active fighting where they had nothing to do but sit in the ship, or make trouble as expected of mechs with extensive criminal records on the planets their latest pit stop let them roam around, became more frequent and they filled the void with poker, engex, and card games. When there was nobody to shoot at, the Combaticons made do. They were an insular group and without consistent contact with other Cybertronians except through online forums, they became moreso. Blast Off amused himself by trying to complete his collection of antique star charts.

Pirates by the asteroid belts near Urtusk proved an opportunity for slaughtering organics en mass. Pitching the bodies into the vacuum of space, Blast Off and Swindle took care of rewiring the ships’ autopilot to follow them. They hauled both of the pirates’ ships to a market and sold them off to the primitives for a tidy sum.

This, Onslaught declared, meant they had earned a short reward. A month or so somewhere relaxing and hard to trace.

Monacus was out of question. Too close to the Cybertronian civil war.

A resort planet in another galactic region was their stop for a month. Swindle, who remained in steady contact with his business contacts back on Cybertron, kept selling tips to both fellow deserters and Autobots alike (Onslaught remarked to Blast Off that he strongly suspected Swindle had left behind a low-level AI decoy drone on Cybertron to keep making sales in his stead and forward him the money while he was off-planet.)

There was an interstellar trade dispute between Huizenga and Rigel IV, with Rigel III supporting its neighboring planet.

One of the involved companies hired the Combaticons. The contact went well and after the dispute had been resolved, the company and the Combaticons parted ways.

It was after this, while the team was well-paid but low on munitions, when Swindle stood up and informed Onslaught he’d just gotten wind of a massive tip-off that could be just what they were looking for.

Swindle’s information led them back to a fringe world called Presidium, a leftover colony that had been claimed in the name of Cybertronian expansion by one of the old Primes. Fragged if Blast Off could remember which one off the top of his helm. The metalloid race that lived on Presidium were single-opticed, multi-limbed spindly fliers that glided on the winds. They spoke a dialect of bastardized Cybertronic speedily to the Combaticons when the team walked into a colony city, and their own language to each other in hushed tones. Blast Off could not imagine the past colonization had been kind to them.

Expanses of black stone, chasms, and cliffs stretched as far as the optic could see.

It was interspersed with black towers that reminded Blast Off of lighthouses whose yellow beams swept in endless circles, washing over the cold rock. He wondered what purpose they served to the Presidiumians. There were liquid lakes with ash dark beaches, all locked in underground caverns and away from the pale lavender sky that crowned the planet.

A scuffle with a ship crewed by one of the organic species who shot at Cybertronians on sight had left the Combaticons’ starship in need of heavy repairs and grounded for the foreseeable future. The starship was parked back in the city. That wasn’t a deal-breaker, since Blast Off’s cargo hold would be sufficient to transport the goods they had hiked up the mountain to steal.

The goods in question, of course, were locked within a vault chiseled out of a sheer cliffside those front dwarfed even Cybertronians. The front door was a hundred feet tall, and the vault itself had to be at least two hundred feet at the most conservative estimate. Vortex commented it was ridiculous, building something this big just to chunk perfectly decent weaponry in it to gather dust. What a waste. Weapons were made to be _used_.

Swindle was chattering, all but rubbing his hands together in glee.

“This’ll be a good haul. Plenty of high-yield demolitions and heavy ordinance. Nominus thought these weapon stores were too dangerous to keep on Cybertron.”

But due to the near-crash and the unexpected repairs needed to get the starship working again on top of already depleting two of their credit accounts for the codes Swindle swore up and down came out of the Primes’ restricted high level data archives in Iacon before it had been trashed by their side, Onslaught wasn’t in the best mood and his field burned with it. He had no qualms about expressing his ire. “I don’t care why it’s here, Swindle. I just want to _get it_ and _get out_.”

Swindle waved his sourness off. “Just think of it, Onslaught—we’ll score enough firepower here to overthrow a small planetary dictatorship by the end of the day!”

Temper subsiding for a moment, possibly appeased by the tantalizing promise of incredibly destructive weapons, Onslaught nodded. He tapped his foot. They had less than an hour to help themselves to the vault’s contents before the gap in security the team was exploiting closed. Onslaught planned to remain on schedule.

“We paid a high price for Nominus’ old access codes. Time to see if they were worth it. Open it up, Blast Off.”

Blast Off moved closer. The lights on the old terminal protruding from the front door blinked red.

(Try to open it without the right access codes, and one ran a decent risk of the vault self-destructing and detonating all the high-yield weaponry inside it—a feat that might deny any trespassers their loot and cost them their lives but it also would destabilize the crust of the whole region and kill off any people living nearby. Nominus never had been all that troubled by dead aliens. Blast Off would rather minimize collateral damage. And not get blown up.)

Carefully, Blast Off jacked his connector cable into the access slot and the systems lit up to demand his credentials. He input the codes and waited for the red lights to flash to blue as the security was overrode and access was granted. After a moment, the corners of his lips turned down under his mask. He said, “Something’s wrong here, sir. The passcodes aren’t working.”

Onslaught sighed. “You’re plugging them in right?”

Blast Off huffed, insulted by the implication he would be so lazy as to get a simple code wrong. “ _Of course I am_! The system’s just… locked.”

The terminal’s lights continued to blink red.

The greedy shine on Swindle’s face faltered.

Flanking either side of Onslaught and Swindle, Vortex and Brawl exchanged glances.

“Swindle…” Onslaught crossed his arms and pivoted to face him. “This was _your_ intel. _Your_ operation. Is there anything you want to tell us?” He stepped closer, looming over Swindle. Back-mounted cannons started to whine with energy build-up. Onslaught wasn’t going to shoot his subordinate, but he was ticked off about emptying two accounts worth of credits for what now had all the hallmarks of a scam and when he took his temper out on somebody, he was rarely gentle about it. “Before I blow a _hole_ through your tiny processor?”

Blast Off could tell they were gearing up for an argument. He resisted the urge to roll his optics. Brawl snorted into his fist.

Swindle leaned back, already squirming. “Look, boss—it ain’t _me_! Not _my_ fault, it—”

An electronic voice drowned him out. **SECURITY OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. BLAST DOORS OPENING.**

Blast Off jumped.

The terminal’s lights flickered to blue.

Blast Off stepped backwards, retreating to stand next to his team. The first layer of the front doors irised open. With a series of clanging, the second layer of blast doors folded back into the walls to reveal a cluster of darkened figures behind a shimmering forcefield. Behind the figures, a narrow corridor snaked away into the gloom.

The forcefield dissolved and Starscream stepped forward, wings sweeping out.

Behind him, the silhouettes of other Decepticons stood.

The sound of Onslaught’s charging cannons abruptly halted. Quarrels cutting off, the Combaticons shifted onto high alert. A wave of muttering passed over them. Brawl’s hand dropped down to where his blaster was stored in his hip compartment. Vortex went very still. Blast Off and Swindle glanced behind them to check if a second party of Decepticons was coming up behind to pin them down on both sides. (There wasn’t.)

They were deserters.

The odds that a member of the Decepticon High Command had come after them, a full party in tow, to offer a reward for rejecting the mech who had taken over leadership were slim to none. The Combaticons were prepared to fight their way out to spare themselves the fate of a court martial followed by a summary execution as a unit.

“Greetings, Combaticons! I’m pleased to see you’re all as punctual as ever,” Starscream crowed. “No need to blame poor Swindle. We _allowed_ the codes to fall into his hands. He didn’t know we were behind this operation.”

Onslaught wasn’t interested.

Shoulders squared, he slammed a foot down in front of him and swept out an arm.

“We want the weapons, Starscream. We’ve got no quarrel with you—unless you’re enough of a fool to try and muscle in on our takings.”

The smirk plastered across Starscream’s face didn’t twitch: it broadened.

“I think you misunderstand, Onslaught. It’s taken us a while to catch up with you and your crew... The only weapons we’re interested in obtaining are _you_.”

Taken aback, Onslaught’s arm stiffened as if shock had automatically locked his joints and dropped.

Behind him, Blast Off’s intense stare burned. Swindle edged away from their leader and towards Vortex. Onslaught tilted his head slightly. There was a long pause. An incredulous note appeared in Onslaught’s tone as he said slowly, “You… went to all this trouble—because you want us for a _job_?”

“That’s correct.” Starscream formed a gun with his fingers and cheekily mimicked taking a shot. “There’s another stage of the war coming. A reckoning so big and so destructive… It _has_ to have you on the frontlines.”

< _What a total load of slag._ _If they got here first and gave Swin the codes and set this up_ ,> Vortex hissed on their secure channel, < _There’s no doubt they already emptied this place of the weapons we wanted_.>

< _Vortex is correct,_ > Blast Off said. < _The intel’s a wash. Should we hear this out or walk away?_ >

< _This ain’t a democracy._ > Swindle complained.

< _I like destruction! I wanna make things blow up!_ > Brawl pitched in eagerly.

< _Brawl, how ‘bout you tell us something we don’t already know?_ >

Onslaught intervened. < _Calm down. Starscream wouldn’t be pulling a move like this if it was Scorponok’s orders. Let’s see how this plays out._ >

Onslaught’s field acquired a thoughtful edge. Blast Off could almost sense the cold, sharp gears turning over in his helm as Onslaught calculated how to best capitalize.

“A reckoning, huh? How much does it pay?”

Starscream stepped aside and gestured to one of the Decepticons standing behind him. “If you’ll all climb aboard Astrotrain, we can discuss your payment en route.”

Brawl boomed. “En route to where exactly?”

“Cybertron, of course. Home. Where else?”

With an exasperated slant to his wings, Astrotrain transformed and lowered his ramp. As they boarded and Onslaught trudged over to talk to Starscream, Blast Off stole a glance at Swindle. Swindle was glaring at Starscream’s back, disgruntled to have been played.

**////**

Megatron was as bad at staying dead as Orion Pax had been. Scorponok was out of the leader’s seat and Megatron was back in it. But even the beastformer Titan that Megatron had gotten his hands on wasn’t enough for them to re-capture Iacon from the Autobots and Metroplex.

Cybertron was a sieve and the neutrals and fence-sitters continued to flee from it in droves.

The war barrelled on.

They might as well not have left in the first place, for all the difference it made.

Unsanctioned leave time, Swindle called it sarcastically. At least the Combaticons got a short vacation out of it.

**////**

“Gag him,” Blast Off demanded over the speakers.

“Don’t distract me,” Vortex said, intent on the bleeding motorcycle he had trussed up on the floor.

The bleeding meant the motorcycle was leaking onto Blast Off.

“His noise is distracting _me_ ,” Blast Off retorted, swivelling two of the onboard cameras he had to focus on Vortex from multiple angles. “The Autobot’s your prisoner, egro it is _your_ job to keep him from doing so. Gag him, disable his vocalizer, or stop trying to cut him open. I want him to be quiet. Wait for one hour.”

“You hear that?” Vortex crooned at the motorcycle. “If you were only quieter, this would be going so much smoother for all of us.”

Weakly, the motorcycle spat curses.

Blast Off snapped static. Irritating enough Swindle had talked Brawl into sticking his cables into the jeep and fooling around inside him while Blast Off had hauled the cargo they had secured from the Autobots to the meet-up location two months ago, now Vortex was going to try and cut apart a half-dead Autobot and play with him without even waiting for Blast Off to land after their mission in the Manganese Mountains? When he had expressly told Vortex to not do so?

“I _warned_ you.”

He slammed on his thrusters, tilted violently to put his passengers off balance and opened his cargo door.

Blast Off shot straight up and Vortex and the Autobot went straight down, to Vortex’s shrill and indignant shriek at being tossed out into the open air from his teammate. Vortex could shriek all he wanted; he had his alt mode to flip himself into.

If Vortex was going to be uncouth, he could fly himself the rest of the way back to base since Blast Off had covered the majority of it for him.

**////**

At a table in the bustling mess hall, Brawl and Horri-Bull were locked in an arm-wrestling contest.

Two Guncons, Acid Storm, one of the Reflector components, that jet who was always at Horri-Bull’s side, and a loose circle of grunts encircled them, shouting and noisily egging the struggle on.

His other hand clamped around the table’s edge, the mechanisms in his elbow grinding, Horri-Bull strained to make Brawl’s arm bend and taunted him that nobody would blame him for folding out now since he _was_ going to _lose_ anyway. Visor narrowed ferociously, Brawl tightened his grip painfully and told him to shut the frag up and lose like a mech. Long Haul sat on the other side of the beaten-up table, tapping his foot and waiting to have his turn with the winner of the bout. Freshly defeated and therefore disqualified from the contest, Bonecrusher rubbed the dent on his arm from when his hand had been smashed into the table.

Blast Off had been sitting next to Brawl when the roughhousing had started: the rise in volume had driven him to take his energon to another table. There’d been an empty seat next to the red Stunticon. He’d taken it.

The red Stunticon had given him a deadened stare.

He and Blast Off had proceeded to ignore each other completely.

Tolerable mech, for a Stunticon.

Too boisterous to slip into the background like Blast Off did, Brawl didn’t share his teammate’s stand-offish nature.

Brawl liked dealing with other people, though for the sake of their audio feeds people didn’t like dealing with him. He went out of his way to socialize with other soldiers in the ranks.

Early on, when the Combaticons were still settling into the Decepticon fold, Brawl and Horri-Bull had hit it off as friends who enjoyed beating each other’s faces in for fun. Quite _literally_ hit it off: there’d been a fistfight and a trip to a medic involved. Blast Off considered this typical of Brawl. He met somebody on his intellectual level, they couldn’t resist posturing. It was common and predictable.

_CLANG!_

Metal banged on metal.

Horri-Bull had lost.

**////**

The medbay of the remote outpost they were stationed on smelled sterile.

Partially dismantled to the point where sections of his endoskeleton and struts hung bare, delicate wires showing, Blast Off laid on the slanted medical platform and stared up at the ceiling. A good chunk of his sensor network had been taken off offline. It induced a curious numbing sensation. There was an oil stain splotched across the joining edges of two ceiling panels that he was trying to decide if it looked more like the outline of a new-born nebula or more like a deformed construction vehicle when a proximity alert on his radar pinged him. Moments later there came the strike of heavy feet on floor tiling.

“They’re not done with the frame reformat?” Onslaught asked. “The operation was scheduled on the roster to be finished at this time.”

Barely moving his head, Blast Off said. “They’re _mostly_ finished. They have to install the last modifications to my onboard power plant, that’s all. Minor ones. And then screw my outer armor back on.”

“And the medic is absent from this room instead of doing so because…”

“Emergency. He’ll be back,” Blast Off said shortly.

His legs remained bolted to the table, but the medic had taken off the cuffs on his arms and allowed him room to sit upright and stretch briefly while they rushed off to handle a patient who was starting to flatline. Blast Off hadn’t chosen to move but when Onslaught walked closer, Blast Off made himself sit up at his commander’s approach, the closest he could get to standing at attention.

Onslaught stopped next to the table and its accompanying console. “I expected a less drastic change.”

He blinked at the comment before looking down at himself. Ah. Yes. That. He estimated he was a head taller than Onslaught in this new combat frame. If he stood up, he would tower over him.

“Unlike you or our resident bricks-for-brains, I wasn’t made to support much integrated weaponry,” Blast Off said truthfully. Every deep-wired weaponry system that he had was a modification. He and Swindle were the only two civilian models on the team. Whatever tall tale Vortex spun today about where he came from or what he had been doing before he joined up with Onslaught’s band, the truth of the helicopter’s origins wrote itself out in the sturdiness of his heavy military-grade armor. Clasping a hand around the back of his helm, Blast Off cracked his neck from side to side, tubes and cables flexing. “Especially energy-intensive ones. Mods only went so far. I needed to make room for it.”

“Are the medics predicting a long adjustment period to the increase in your size?” Onslaught asked.

“No. My spark was made from the start to support the true size of my alt mode without straining itself at all,” Blast Off reminded him. Since the day he had been sparked, Blast Off had been displacing a considerable amount of his mass into subspace pockets in the name of keeping his root mode a size that fell more within the standard parameters. Even this reformat hadn’t hit the upper limit of what height Blast Off could comfortably increase his root mode to if he stopped using the subspace pockets. “In all honesty, this upgrade simply means I’m subspacing _less_ of my existing full mass while in root mode.”

“I’m surprised then.” When Blast Off’s field brushed his questioningly, Onslaught clarified. “If you could always easily scale up without straining your spark in the slightest, why remain smaller than you had potential to be?”

Blast Off tilted his helm placidly.

Then he said, “I saw no reason to change, sir.” Blast Off transformed several ancillary panels out of the way so the front of his abdomen was exposed, bare cables and metal struts, reshuffling plates into partial reconfigurations. He was careful to keep the lower armor over his interface hardware in place and his non-medical access ports hidden, and his spark chamber locked securely behind its thick additional layers of plating.

“This,” Blast Off tapped the polished black installations. “Modifications to allow me to perform carpet bombing runs. Some of what I’m making room for. It’s easier to change in this way.” He twisted around to the right, naked internals and pistons shifting with the movement. “And here, do you recognize this? Performance boosters. They’ll help shunt power off to my leg cannons more efficiently.”

Onslaught reached out and put a hand on one of the internal parts inside Blast Off. “And if I’m not mistaken, this one looks like a generator module for a gravity wave.”

Blast Off could feel the intrusion of Onslaught’s hand up inside him, fingers pressed against the metal, the invading tingle of his electrical interference.

It was so close to Blast Off’s energon lines. It was so warm.

“Correct. That mechanism generates the artificial gravity for my alt mode.” He explained. “You can’t see from my front like that, but it’s hooked around to the one that handles my mass shifting.”

“Is that why you can’t generate it out of alt mode? Because you need both in usage simultaneously. I had wondered.”

Blast Off nodded.

Onslaught pulled his hand out of Blast Off’s internals. “It’ll be a treat to see you put the upgrades to work on the job.”

**////**

The patrol squad was pinned in place by the enemy Autobots where they had taken shelter inside a half-destroyed building. It was constructed up against the hill that curved downward to meet the bottom of the gorge. Swindle, Blast Off, and two of the others had left the rest of the squad exchanging laserfire with the Autobots to hold them back and climbed up a rickety metal staircase to one of the upper stories. Higher ground would serve as a position to snipe from. From there, they crept onto the next ruin’s side balcony and into its walls. Moving through three more houses put them right next to the Autobots.

Hunkered down next to a pile of iron pipes behind a battle-ruined wall, Blast Off checked down the sights of his rifle: in the small square of vision it granted him, flickers of color and biolights indicated the locations of the two Autobot squads that had chased their patrol down.

The enemy hadn’t noticed their approach. They were too focused onto the laserfire flashing out from the building directly in front of them.

A surprise attack would cut down their numbers. Buy them time to call for reinforcements.

“Do you see mechs down there?” Blast Off asked, snapping in a fresh casing.

“Yes. Hard to miss ‘em,” Swindle said, shoulder pressed against the wall and his gun’s barrel pointed towards the ceiling.

“I don’t see any mechs,” Blast Off coldly adjusted the sights of his rifle, locking in the red crosshairs on a target’s chassis. “Not one. All that’s down there is moving targets.” And it was simpler to think of a target as a thing rather than a mech.

His finger squeezed the trigger.

**////**

The Stunticons had run amuck on Magmara 9’s volcanic moon before they had been recalled just in time to see Scorponok fleeing Cybertron with his tail between his legs. A group of Cybertronian neutrals had settled on the moon: the Stunticons hooting and tearing like madmechs down the roads constructed above the magma beds convinced many of the survivors of their raids to bolt back into their starships and get going.

The neutrals that did so were lucky.

Motormaster had no reason to conceal the planet’s location from the upper ranks after all.

The Stunticons never returned to Magmara 9 nor its moon, but an infiltration unit would land on the moon one day and set about making preparations for an Decepticon invasion.

Magmara 9 was a planet inhabited by four native species, two of which were organic insectoids, one of which was organic reptilians, and one of which was a mechanical species that had evolved from techorganic backgrounds. None of the Decepticons made a distinction between the reptilians and the insectoids, given both were equally organic and therefore equally repulsive. Their cities shone and glass domes containing carved artworks and fungal gardens floated atop lakes. Their civilization had learned to build technology to control and harness the geothermal power from their planet’s core and the energy created by the magma from the dozens of small volcano rings to meet their needs.

It made them rich and unification into a global government followed. The four species shared their planet with each other amiably.

Upon reviewing the intelligence reports sent back by the spies dispatched to begin the earliest phase of infiltration, Soundwave had decreed it perverse, that mechanicals would treat inferior _organics_ as their equals. It was duly noted that the mechanical species would be included in the extermination.

The Autobots weren’t aware the Decepticons were targeting the planet. Covert operations were key to keeping it that way until Magmara 9 was destabilized to the point where the troops could move in to plunder it.

Soundwave had command of the campaign.

He stuck to protocol.

Infiltration went smoothly.

By the time the Autobots had caught wind of the planet’s plight and reacted, the Decepticon unit had surpassed the need for Phase One security and started depositing supplies and troops openly at their bases of operations. It wasn’t difficult, given the natives were warring with each other and the facsimiles had done their job of keeping the hostilities the Decepticons had created running high with no end in sight. The Combaticons were called in, with Onslaught being given control over all of the ground and aerial troops on the campaign by Soundwave.

In a dropship transport, packed with the rest of the battalion they were with, Blast Off could pick out the tiny bright blazes of fires far below and the pillars of ash, black bulges suffused by red and orange, billowing upward from the ravaged battlefront.

At his shoulder, Vortex laughed. “Another busy, busy day, yet another bunch of ‘Bots to kill!”

“Mm,” Blast Off said.

Over the dropship’s speakers, the pilot was shouting a spiel about the glory of the Decepticons.

“Does he think anybody’s taking that script seriously?” Vortex asked. “Boring rallying call.”

Blast Off moved his thumb down the handle of his blaster. “It’s about troop morale. Everybody’s here to kill the enemy already. It doesn’t need to be innovative to be inspiring.”

“You don’t sound inspired.”

“... We’ve heard it a thousand times. It _is_ rather scripted.”

A bomb slammed into the dropship and it shook mightily. Along with the other troopers, Blast Off and Vortex lurched to the side, Blast Off’s helm crashing into the interior. Alarms blared. The floor went sideways at an angle. Two Autobot flightframes whizzed past, tauntingly close. Clutching his helm, Blast Off glared after them.

“Well, _now_ I’m inspired. Let’s hit it, Vortex.”

Playfully, Vortex dipped a half-bow and swept his arm out towards the open air. “After you!”

Shoving his blaster into subspace, Blast Off offered him a hidden smirk behind his mask. “Last one down buys the first round of energon after this.” His feet went over the edge and he plummeted downward, the wind howling in his audials as gravity took hold and he gained speed. With a burst of thrust, Blast Off accelerated towards the battlefront, Vortex at his back, the helicopter’s excitement infectious.

**////**

Wanting Onslaught was just Blast Off enjoying himself and playing a game right up until it wasn’t a game anymore.

The inside of the bar on the space station was filled with off-duty Decepticon soldiers. The background buzz of active transmissions and commlink frequencies blended into the dim. He and Onslaught wound up in a corner alone, eventually. The air was warm and smoky and they had both had only a drink or two each. Swindle and Brawl were out and about, mingling in the crowds. Vortex had sat at their table for a short while but he had finished his drink, gotten up and trotted delightedly off, probably to amuse himself in entertainment commonly found in cheap simulations and dark alleys.

Blast Off’s glossa tingled from the high grade. The conversation flowed well between them, easy and laid-back, and Blast Off was comfortable, heated inside and outside.

He dropped his guard.

The war wasn’t gone.

It was circling outside but for the moment, it was held at bay.

Blast Off looked at Onslaught through a tipsy haze and thought he would like nothing better than to sit here, at this dirty table in this tiny, warm corner of an overcrowded room where nobody else was bothering them or looking at them and nurse his drink and forget the war and listen to Onslaught talk on animatedly about everything he wanted to talk about forever. Onslaught had a way with words that made topics Blast Off hadn’t cared about before Onslaught got worked up about them and started lecturing fascinating. That sounded wonderful.

Then he processed that thought.

This prompted the second thought.

_Oh._

This led into the third thought.

 _Oh_ no _._

There was only one appropriate response: _Primus. Fragging. Damnit_.

Blast Off then spent the next eight hundred years pretending the first thought never was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blast Off: (realizes Onslaught’s hot and he’s kinda attracted to him)  
> Blast Off: huh. okay. anyway, moving on with life  
> vs.  
> Blast Off: (realizes he’s in love with Onslaught)  
> Blast Off:  
> Blast Off: (immediately enters the five stages of grief)


	4. the wrong end of a very long tunnel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (slaps roof of fic) this bad boy can fit so much pining, blatant war crimes, and leapfrogging between denial and honesty in it!

Denial was where Blast Off took refuge and it was there he stayed.

After the Autobots were driven off-planet, Magmara 9 was secured under Decepticon control; a scab of a world stripped down to molten magma oceans and shattered cities. Groups of the two remaining organic species were being shunted off-planet for usage as cheap labor when the Combaticons were given their dues for a job well-done and transferred to the next campaign.

Onslaught had earned a promotion. One of the perks the higher rank netted Onslaught was command over one of the warships coming from the faction’s spaceports, far superior to a stolen starship. Battles cost them ships in addition to troops. Replacement ships were built in the shadows of Warsweepers. With more conquests came more raw materials to do so and with a fresh planet available, the spaceports were churning them out.

The warship took the Combaticons and its crew to the rendezvous with the campaign’s invasion force. Blast Off was too sunken in his crisis to pay heed to anything beyond going through the motions of his crew duties like an automaton.

Docking and disembarking at the station meant Vortex whirled away to inspect what the interrogation facilities had to offer, and Swindle pulled a vanishing act the moment his feet hit the deck to find where the station personnel’s black market was being hosted. Flanking their commander on either side, Brawl and Blast Off followed Onslaught through a parade of military reviews with a gaggle of high ranking officers, bringing them up to speed on the Decepticons’s progress in crushing native resistance. Making the right first impression didn’t hurt, Onslaught had told them beforehand, and when you were in a faction where might so often made right, it was wise to cover up weaknesses and present a strong front.

It was later, as Blast Off supervised the Decepticons restocking and pumping fuel into the warship, that it struck him that avoiding the bridge (where Onslaught was most likely to be, occupying the captain’s chair) was…

It wasn’t a solution that was going to work out long-term.

Common sense fought against denial.

It lost.

Blast Off kept avoiding the bridge unless he had no choice but to be there.

In respect to that, Onslaught’s promotion landed in the area of being unwittingly well-timed. He was so busy strengthening his position, it didn’t register that Blast Off’s short responses to remarks addressed to him and the shuttle’s otherwise silent focus on the duty station he manned during his shift on the bridge and how Blast Off slipped out at the shift’s end without lingering was out of the ordinary behavior.

Before, that would have been fine.

He’d been loyal to Onslaught long before this fever had seized hold. But now—now he had looked at Onslaught and realized his wants had gone from looking to touching to _something_ that Blast Off wasn’t ready to confront and didn’t want to own up to existing even subconsciously. Being around Onslaught too much meant his thoughts would start drifting towards that _something_ and that— _that_ was—

He turned away from it.

The campaign ended in another victory.

Blast Off resorted to requesting a remote mission.

Onslaught gave him a confused, long-suffering look when Blast Off filled out the paperwork forms and politely handed it to him in his office—Onslaught didn’t tend to assign any of his Combaticons to serving other commanders and they typically didn’t _ask_ to be. Onslaught would only occasionally lend them out like especially lethal weapons if he was asked or ordered to. Yes, it was with the ulterior motive of having them spy on the other Decepticons and report back to their findings privately to Onslaught for future power games and blackmail, but that didn’t change the fact that Onslaught would expect his elite team to perform well as sparkless murdering machines while temporarily serving in other units. And they did perform well.

But Blast Off offered and he had no important duties at the moment. Onslaught signed off on it. Wasting no time, Blast Off took off for the galactic coordinates in the sector he’d been assigned to the next morning.

The point of the mission was that it would be long and tedious and far, far away from Onslaught.

He laid the blame on the situation. The confined space of the war. The circumstances that had him working in close tandem with Onslaught day in and day out, as they went trudging through muddy combat zones, participating in blearily informal briefings, grumbling about how poor quality the rations they got were, side by side. Constant, repeated exposure to the source of what made him feel so off-balance had him conflating familiarity with infatuation, Blast Off was convinced. It had unused, dusty parts of his processor lighting up in interest for an affair that Blast Off wasn’t going to start. It was—a glitch. He was malfunctioning. That thought hadn’t really happened. He couldn’t have become so overly attached. Blast Off was above that. It was just glitching. _Glitching_. Highly unprofessional glitching.

If he put distance between himself and Onslaught, his emotional subsystems would reset their defaults back to what they should be.

Deprived of fuel, the infatuation would wear off.

A little time apart.

That’s what he needed.

(The reassurances Blast Off fed himself were feeble. He clung to them.)

The mission—a century of patrolling asteroid fields and an energy mining operation in an inhospitable environment, with minimal engagement in battle—was _exactly_ as long and boring as it had looked to be on paper.

During it, Blast Off wasn’t as lonely as he might have been. His teammates sent comms at irregular intervals, undoubtedly due to them not passing up an opening to make pests of themselves and in doing so, impose upon Blast Off’s valuable personal time. The Combaticons knew each others’ personal frequencies. Even Brawl, who had taken several decades to bother to memorize said frequencies and five years to accurately match frequencies to owners. Brawl had called Swindle’s throw-away burner numbers rather than Swindle or Blast Off like he’d been trying to do an embarrassing number of times. Blast Off supposed Brawl hadn’t been keen on using processor power that he could be instead spending on the categories of various explosives, ranked by how loud a _BOOM_ they gave when their fuses were lit.

It would be the truth to say Blast Off didn’t allow himself to dwell on Onslaught while he was away. He didn’t long for him, he didn’t wonder what he was doing or if he was safe.

That would defeat the point.

Blast Off was _not_ going to give his processor an inch of leeway.

When Onslaught sent comms, providing his opinion on the state of the frontlines or expecting status reports, duty dictated Blast Off should reply. He chased off a trespasser from one of the asteroids (in likelihood the most exciting incident that would happen for the rest of the month) and went back to his room in the barracks next to the mining operation’s faculty that night to scrutinize the wording of one of the reports he had typed out and would transmit to Onslaught tomorrow. Was it suitably concise? Without being _too_ remote? He didn’t want Onslaught to pick up on anything being amiss. If luck was on his side, it soon wouldn’t be.

After a half hour of agonizing, he deleted two sentences and added in three more. That would do it. Nothing suspicious here.

The next morning Blast Off hit _send,_ and put it and the mech he’d transmitted it to out of his mind until the next time he had to submit a report.

Patrols came and went. One day passed into another.

The mission ended.

He wandered through the control room when he came back to the command center, looking forward to a lengthy visit to a washracks where the solvent didn’t come out a vaguely sludgy purple nor smell like something had died in it to wash out the build-up of asteroid dust in his armor gaps and debating how much he could afford to bribe Swindle to get his hands on a decent buffer, and Onslaught was _there_ , visor looking up from the requisitions lists and battle diagram displays floating in front of him.

“Blast Off,” he greeted him like Blast Off had just stepped out for a moment rather than years. Like he had taken for granted that Blast Off would always come back to him without a hitch.

Blast Off stopped, visor flinching at the edges, rooted to the spot. He didn’t process what Onslaught was saying after that because the sound of that voice saying his name and Onslaught’s proximity brought the warmth in his chest that he’d tried so hard to starve surging back in a manner the messages hadn’t.

Blast Off felt his fuel tank turn over in dawning dismay.

He just… No.

Blast Off ran through a silent literary of colorful expletives and discarded the working hypothesis he’d been using for the last century.

This wasn’t a glitch.

This was real.

**////**

No sound traveled in the vacuum of space.

Blast Off floated above the planet, waiting for the local star’s light to seep out from behind the planet’s rim and flood across his plating. Spread out below him was a browned expanse of gritty, rolling sand and desert and the far-off wrinkles of mountain ranges, mottled with canyons and giant sinkholes, under the perpetually orange atmospheric haze. The high orbital path Blast Off plotted out took him into nightrise, the side of the planet covered in darkness. The planet had been an uninhabited one before their war crashed onto it: no webs of city lights nor highways flecked the gloom. But the planet was due to complete another one of its rotations and the side Blast Off was on would turn from the unbroken darkness and emerge into the sunlight.

Miles below, the Cybertronians fighting each other would soon see a sunrise.

It would be obscured by the sand dunes and the mountains rearing upward like giant shoulders but it would tell them they had survived another night. From above, nothing obscured the bright white corona building up, growing and growing as the minutes ticked by, on the rim. The blinding blot of the star exploded into view, presenting the illusion of it pulling away from the planet it had been eclipsed behind.

Blast Off had been up in orbit for weeks and each circle around the planet brought either work, work, and more work, or intense boredom—occasionally both at the same time.

Coordinate with the scattering of Decepticons who had space-rated satellite alt modes to transmit orders in real time from warships to soldiers.

Relay messages from this base to another base.

Target and destroy with orbital bombardment emptied from his cannons onto this bridge the Autobots built to move supplies across a canyon. Kill any of the bots using it at the time as a bonus.

Help the planetside officers direct troop maneuvers in this battle.

Map the geography of this area.

Observe this other area for Autobot activity.

Conduct reconnaissance, map another different area in preparation for that battle.

Assist in patching up holes in the picture the higher echelons of officers had constructed of events outside the command center. Image captures snapped by ground scouts on their patrols were easier to comprehend when examined in context of a planetary view. Onslaught had used Blast Off before to provide him with an elevated perspective on ongoing action, the truck quick to seize on the benefits of the stream of scans for tactical purposes, so this was nothing new. Video of an undercover Autobot infiltrator sneaking away to plant a bomb recorded at the right moment could be as key to a victory as an attack launched from space to wipe out the enemy troops.

But the troops were just faceless dots on his scanners unless Blast Off zoomed in with his optical sensors. It was dull, watching them scurry.

Tiny faceless targets.

It rendered the slaughter almost abstracted, almost simulated, a game, dots winking out on his radar and being replaced by new dots. It was looking increasingly likely the Autobots would come out the winners on this front. Their dots were driving back clusters of the Decepticons’ dots, breaking their formations and scattering them up the mountain flanks.

An incoming transmission pinged Blast Off on his HUD to accept it. Another sunrise, another set of orders. More messages to relay. A request for an update on his mapping progress.

… No comms from the rest of the team.

Flicking his wings as if to drive away the shades of lethargy and irritation in his helm, Blast Off turned over and let the warm glow from the sunrise spill over his underside.

Back to work.

**////**

Blast Off fumed.

If this was something he’d gone and actually inflicted upon himself—

Onslaught would never—he wouldn’t, it wasn’t going to pan out like… Onslaught was a colossal self-absorbed aft and it was his fault, not Blast Off’s fault, Onslaught and his nice tires and his broad shoulders, that Blast Off felt this way and Onslaught hadn’t even had the common decency to notice the change and take some _responsibility_! The nerve.

In a fit of pique, Blast Off was angry at him for it.

The Combaticon leader chased his own goals and spared little thought for trivial matters that didn’t have to with advancing their position (and therefore his own) in the army. Blast Off could only too easily picture Onslaught sorting out where his priorities ought to currently be, and shoving _courtship_ in at the bottom with the rest of the ones deemed unnecessary.

But Blast Off’s spark didn’t care one whit about that.

It crammed itself up his intake so he felt like he was choking on it when Onslaught put a hand on his shoulder vent or praised him. It pulsed charge in a fuzzy, electric buzz outward, from his core to the ends of his fingertips, when appendages casually brushed even if Blast Off understood there was no intent behind the physical contact.

Why had the stupid thing picked somebody like Onslaught as the mech to fall for?

Strict. Ruthless. Ambitious. Unsentimental.

These were traits that were well and fine to have in a commander in wartime, but less than desirable in a romantic partner.

**////**

There was irony to what he wanted.

Even before the war had depleted their species’ numbers—even before Megatron had christened his faction with the moniker they bore, before events had transpired to strip Blast Off of his rightful status and sent Blast Off fleeing into the criminal underside of Cybertron—space shuttle alt modes had been rare. Prized, by the stifling tenets of a system that allotted value according to one’s alt mode, and not according to who one was as a person.

Blast Off’s spark had been harvested so close to the hot spot reserved for one of Alihex’s Houses that proximity had catapulted him even higher in that hierarchy. He’d had from his first days in a blacksmith’s care access to wealth, class, the patronage of a House with history and clout. And he’d been reared to possess and appreciate proper university education, poise, and the sophistication that came with the circles hosted by well-cultured mecha. He knew how to dance and smile and bow at the correct cues. Knew to nod along with the courtesies of fine society.

A promising career had laid ahead of him. His teachers and the few peers he had tolerated treated that as a foregone conclusion.

Once, he had wanted for nothing.

(Materially, anyway. It was possible to be in the middle of a crowd of mechs shined up like floor models on display and still feel quite desperately alone.)

Once.

He had burned _that_ bridge so long ago Blast Off felt more nostalgia than sorrow over it.

On the other hand, Onslaught’s alt mode wasn’t rare. A truck? Hardly uncommon.

A grounder who’d been sparked to the military class. A soldier who had left the army. A criminal, a murderer, a large warframe with nicked-up fingers and visible cannon turrets? The fine society imbeciles Blast Off had counted as his fellows would have looked down their noses at him in their sweetest moods.

None of them would have understood what a _waste_ it would have been if somebody with a mind like Onslaught had caught a bullet to the helm saving a random Primal Vanguard member as his manufacturers intended that he do.

All they would have seen was canon fodder reaching above his station.

The same society that placed Blast Off in such lofty heights would have looked aghast if he had gone courting a lowly soldier from the military class, his social inferior, without the valor of a suitably decorated array of metals pinned to the soldier’s chest to gloss over the differences in class. The scandal that openly pursuing him would have been caused! Nowhere approaching that of that one bot from House Ambus who’d taken up with a data stick, _that_ had been an uproar back before one of the Primes had passed the bill for token reforms for disposals, but still certainly something that would’ve blackened the gloss of Blast Off’s reputation with rumors. Before he’d lost his status, Onslaught would have been the one who’d have to work to make Blast Off give him the time of day, much less notice him.

In the present, Onslaught was his commanding officer and Blast Off was the one struggling to devise a means of coping with the direction his affections towards a mech that might not be attainable had taken.

Slouched in a corner and keying up a news catalogue and scrolling without reading it, Blast Off reflected upon how sour irony tasted.

**////**

After a battle—somewhere on Ataglan or Traujor or Vyrgul 7, what was the difference? Why keep track of where the fighting happened? What did it matter? The campaigns were beginning to merge together into one long, monotonous blur of carnage and energon to Blast Off—Vortex and Brawl were playing a two-mech game of kickball with a severed helm, amidst the battlefield debris that had once been a grassy plain.

Onslaught and Swindle were sitting under the shade of one of the alien mushroom trees, with a three dimensional map of the local solar system folded out between them. Onslaught was pointing at a location on it. Talking shop, no doubt.

Datapad held in front of him, Blast Off counted up the crates of intact freight and unused ammunition to put into the after-action report.

“Hey, Blast Off!” Brawl yelled. Blast Off turned around, helm lilted inquisitively. “Heads’ up!”

On pure reflex, Blast Off’s hand snapped up and he caught the helm one-handed, the broken wires dangling from its bottom stained pink and smacking in a wet rattle of parts against his fingers. He stared. With its metal gone grey and only the cracked shards of yellow glass left lining its hollow optics, he couldn’t tell which faction it had been in life. It could have been either. In death, Decepticon and Autobot were indistinguishable from each other.

“Frag OFF, Brawl!” He pulled his arm back and with pinpoint precision beaned Brawl in the face with the helm. Brawl bellowed. Vortex laughed.

**////**

In a skirmish with a squad of Autobot fliers (who had been as unprepared to catch them out in the open as the Decepticons had been to be discovered when the Autobots dove through the cloud cover and right above the location where the Decepticons were) Vortex took a blow that had cracked the side of his fuel tank, partially-processed fuel dripping downward into delicate wires.

He was benched in the warship’s medbay until he escaped or Onslaught authorized his release. Since the medics had taken the precaution of clamping the helicopter’s limbs to the medical slab to prevent him from making trouble, getting an authorized bill of health was Vortex’s quickest ticket out of the medbay.

Swindle’s treatment was sitting in place while a medic welded a gash in his foot.

He was out of the medbay within a half hour.

Blast Off was perusing for updates to the recent casualties list in the officers’ rec room when Swindle sidled past and into the hallway that led to their quarters. Space was limited aboard the ship, forcing the grunts into shared bunkrooms, but rank came with privileges. The Combaticons had their own small rooms. Blast Off watched Swindle go without speaking, then returned his attention to the list. One Decepticon was marked as KIA from the skirmish and if the two mecha keeping Vortex company in the medbay recovered, he’d remain the only one. Their section of the front was in another one of the war’s lulls where everything was deceptively slow. The warship had a brig-full of Autobot prisoners. They were being carted to a prisoner exchange. Orders from up top.

The Autobots had a transport of notable Decepticon prisoners which Autobot High Command was more than ready to sentence to Garrus-9 unless the exchange took place. Its warden, Fortress Maximus would be standing by with a full battalion in case anybody got ideas about double-crossing the other side.

Many of the crew sneered at Fortress Maximus believing his presence would be a real deterrence if the Decepticons didn’t want to play nice, but nobody had forgotten Simanzi and a planet scorching their feet.

Blast Off remembered Simanzi too.

A casualty list that spanned generations.

He remembered crouching in a barricade near where they’d been deployed near the end of it, concussion blasts cracking the air. Shelling. Deafening. A bomb would drop, detonating and whiting out the world, then another would hit. Choking on the smoke. Too hot to properly ventilate, the planet burning, the skies aflame for miles.

Onslaught, heaving himself out from rubble, half-blinded, his left side having suffered the brunt of a stray shell, his yellow visor shattered, a mass of dripping energon and exposed circuitry where Onslaught’s mask used to be. A medic hadn’t come for a long time. Blast Off had been able to see bits of Onslaught’s left audial’s inner mechanisms through the cracks and the blasted, bleeding parts. Blast Off wasn’t squeamish. That had been burnt out soon after he’d picked up a blaster. Bleeding only bothered him with its messiness, not the fact of the injury itself leaking energon. The explosion had fused two segments of his neck joints incorrectly, preventing Onslaught from turning his head to the left.

It had been so long ago and yet when he recalled Onslaught getting hurt like that...

**////**

Why didn’t love come with an instruction manual?

Blast Off had given up on pretending it was anything else. Love, that was.

Raging against it hadn’t stifled it. It hadn’t gone away; it showed no signs of abating in the future; it was pointless to persist in mislabeling it. Mere lust didn’t do what Blast Off felt justice.

It was disconcertingly upsetting, once Blast Off began mulling it over, to consider the potential that taking it outside of the fantasies in his helm and confessing his feelings to the person that they were centered around might destabilize their relationship. He hadn’t realized before the degree to which he’d become accustomed to Onslaught’s companionship and good regard remaining a controlled variable. A constant that Blast Off could count on to be reassuringly, safely the same. War had made them harder, more vicious, and Onslaught had become more and more busy with juggling the bureaucracy that was keeping the gears of the empire greased, but at the core Onslaught remained the same person he’d been on the day it had started. He hadn’t changed much. If Blast Off felt adrift, he could turn to Onslaught and Onslaught would be able to tell him what to do. Onslaught’s plans didn’t have a perfect success rate. But a failed plan was better than no plan.

It was okay to think Onslaught was easy on the optics. It was okay to want to frag him. A frag was just a frag at the end of the day. People got charged up and sought to expel the excess. There was nothing special about physical desire, about interfacing.

It was beyond foolish to crush on him like this.

They were _in a war_. What did Blast Off hope for, in the event he acted on what he wanted to ask for? There would be no dates at fine restaurants. No long walks together in a park. No outings to the dance halls. Leisure and recreation options were limited. Or simply not there. Rations were limited. Energy sources were reserved for conquest. Privacy was snatched in moments from the rest of the army. They had obligations and messing up could result in soldiers getting killed. And putting that aside...

One day, at any moment, one of them might step into a dropship and be deployed for the last time.

It’d hurt enough to lose a longstanding friend.

It would be pouring engine oil on a wound to lose a lover.

Could the rewards begin to justify the extra risks of opening up your spark?

The yearning was a foreign urge. Blast Off had never been in love before. Love was something that happened to other mechs. It was something Blast Off had read stories about or heard songs of or watched an opera about. It wasn’t something he’d thought about in terms of _himself_.

Blast Off didn’t know what to do with it.

He had to do something. But what?

**////**

Battlefields tended to be short on non-damaged supplies.

That’s why Blast Off was pinning the Autobot’s arms over his head, not letting them budge an inch. Blast Off didn’t need to hold down the Autobot’s legs. Well. His _leg_. Since Vortex was down here and he had cut one of them down to a bleeding stump and was currently in the process of sawing the other leg open at the knee while the Autobot sobbed. Because they were out of bindings and Vortex had left his set of chains and his glue gun back at the base camp, so the teammate he had on hand had been recruited to provide the physical restraint while Vortex worked.

It was drizzling. It had been drizzling for the last week. And the week before that.

“Where’s the main force?” Vortex asked, and the Autobot only screamed.

Blast Off averted his visor. Just because he was assisting didn’t mean he needed to watch this display.

“Tsk, tsk,” Vortex happily twisted the blade. Vital fluids spurted out. “That’s not the kind of cooperation that will keep me from cutting bits off you, Autobot. Or chopping your fuel lines. You have to help yourself out here. Tell me about the troops. Where are they going? To the native resistance? Have the skin jobs finally gotten over their _itty-bitty_ problems with the Autobots?”

The Autobot spewed out some ragged coordinates before it was over.

“Disgusting,” Blast Off said, and didn’t specify if he was directing his contempt at Vortex, the Autobot’s cooling corpse, or himself. (Best to assume he meant the corpse. It was the least troubling option out of the three.) “Energon, all over me. Must you be so untidy?”

Vortex interpreted it as criticism of his techniques.

He gestured with a hand at the mess. “Blasters, I’m missing my toolkit here. I had to improvise.”

Blast Off stood up, stray droplets splattered across the side of his mask. “I suppose so.”

**////**

Audible silence hung in the air like the visible mists did, drifting over the rocky outcroppings, erosion having carved away the rock until arches and misshapen, gargantuan boulders bulging on disproportionately slender columns stood where solid blocks had once been. One could fly across the galaxy and still find on an alien world natural formations whose shapes looked like the twisted formations in the Acid Wastes on Cybertron. Above the rim of the horizon, the sky shone with thousands of stars. Blast Off looked out at the battlefield they had set up camp on the edge of and tried to make himself ignore his initial indifference and feel something about the bodies. Forced his emotional subsystems to consider the data.

Intellectually, he should care.

A twinge of remorse.

Pity for the waste of Cybertronian life, whether they were on the Decepticon side or not, at least.

But it didn’t come. It had come easily at the start of the war. It didn’t anymore.

(Self-preservation in action. If you cared about every soldier you met, your processor might just give out.)

Caring exerted an effort Blast Off couldn’t muster up unless it came to a mech he was already close to. Try as he might, he just felt nothing.

The stillness pervading the rise was disturbed by footsteps crunching over loose pebbles. Blast Off turned around. Onslaught paced across the rise and over to where Blast Off stood. Behind him, the flickering orange glow of the party streamed from the gaps between tents. The silhouettes of other people moved around. Blast Off turned away from him and back to the view.

“I didn’t request company,” Blast Off said neutrally. Onslaught must have noticed Blast Off’s absence and taken it upon himself to come looking for him.

“Sure. You wouldn’t,” Onslaught answered, not dissuaded. “Allow me to impose anyway.”

“Do as you like.”

“I intend to.”

Behind his mask, Blast Off schooled his face to impassivity.

“Sir.”

His commander inserted himself between the view of the battlefield piled high with the dead bodies in the darkness and Blast Off.

Onslaught’s hands shackled themselves possessively around both of Blast Off’s wrists.

“Come on, soldier,” Onslaught said, drawing him away. “A successful campaign is cause for celebration, not standing off by yourself like this. You can have your alone time in orbit later. Now, here’s a party waiting. Come back with me.” Blast Off let himself be led without resistance to where the other Decepticons were hosting their thank-frag-we’re-not-dead festivities.

**////**

However giddily flustered Onslaught’s touch made him feel, Blast Off wasn’t a newspark. He was millions of years old. He had the sense to ask himself _why do I want this_ and _do I think he could feel the same_? Yes, Onslaught was brilliant and focused and confident. Yes, Blast Off’s observations indicated that Onslaught was (at minimum) good at interfacing or why else would Vortex continue to occasionally show up with green and dark blue paint transfers? But Blast Off had met other mecha who were all of those things before and not became infatuated with them.

Those other mechs hadn’t told Blast Off they trusted him and _meant it_ to his face either. Onslaught had. And Blast Off wanted to live up to that trust. Onslaught had given him security, somewhere to belong—the Combaticons. Their voices. Their company, their countless annoyances—it soothed a hunger Blast Off wasn’t aware he’d had until the Combaticons had assuaged it.

Spark called to spark, and he followed the call because he wanted a taste of that brightness, wanted to be welcomed inside. Maybe it was selfish, but Blast Off was aching for something beautiful. He thought he and Onslaught could make something beautiful together.

Blast Off was certain—reasonably certain—that Onslaught cared for him. Loved him, even, in a rough way that Onslaught reserved for his Combaticons. Onslaught didn’t say it outright, but one didn’t share their secrets and their worries and personal access codes with somebody they felt no warmth for. There was affection there.

But his love was that of a friend to another, a commander to a loyal follower. It wasn’t _romantic_.

Not in the fashion Blast Off’s love was.

And Onslaught was self-centered.

It didn’t cross Onslaught’s mind that Blast Off’s feelings were not just a reflection of his own.

And Blast Off valued their friendship, that closeness… but… but...

Blast Off was also fairly certain if he propositioned Onslaught directly, Onslaught would frag him. He would have to time it right, make sure to wait until there was a moment after a battle, Onslaught still buzzing with adrenaline. Ask when Onslaught didn’t have any of his previous options around. He could frame it as a matter of convenience, a teammate helping out a teammate. He didn’t need to bring ‘love’ into that at all. And if he performed well enough, if he was judged worthy, maybe… Maybe Onslaught would condescend to add him to his list of available interface partners and there would be repeats.

Onslaught could separate his feelings from sex. Normally Blast Off could too, but when it came to Onslaught, Blast Off was guiltily aware he wouldn’t be able to untangle his own feelings about his commander from the act, that he would want much more than just a frag. And that wouldn’t be fair to Onslaught, to lead him on. To trick him into thinking it would be a casual no-strings-attached ‘face just to get him into berth when in reality Blast Off wanted something serious.

Unlike Vortex, Blast Off wasn’t a fan of pain. Tormenting himself by getting a taste of what he wanted while knowing in all likelihood he’d never get any more—no. _No_.

So Blast Off didn’t ask Onslaught to frag him.

**////**

Fine. Everything was okay. That was fine.

Fine.

Vortex was a distraction. An available and pleasurable one.

Chase Vortex. Privately, Blast Off preferred to be pursued, but there _was_ a thrill to being the hunter rather than the hunted, and it wasn’t wrong to indulge what a teammate demanded, despite the crude terms he worded his demand in. Chase Vortex, lunge at Vortex, fight him down over his jeering and his attempts to stab vital areas, bent his rotors in unnatural directions. Vortex’s claws put furrows into Blast Off’s sides and scratched at the thick glass on his kibble.

Push Vortex up against the space station wall, hook his arms under Vortex’s knees and heft them up, pull his feet away from the floor. He was shorter than Blast Off. It wasn’t difficult. Fine. Grind his pelvic span against his panel. Frag him into this dirty wall. _Fine_.

Vortex groaned and arched his back, his rotors squealing and throwing sparks as they scored across the metal he was pinned to. This was quick and rough and sharp. There was nothing sweet about it. That was good. That was what Vortex wanted, he liked pain. He glutted himself on it. He wanted it to hurt. Blast Off compiled.

Blast Off wanted it like this too.

He didn’t want it to be tender and gentle.

Like this, his processor couldn’t impose the image of a different mech over Vortex’s squirming form, couldn’t construct heavier plating and thick wheels over the reality of the body joined to him. It was impossible. This was not the place for that. Not here, not now. Focus on Vortex.

Afterwards, shuddering, he held on tight and pretended he wasn’t. Purring with afterglow, Vortex bumped his visor against his face.

“Got what you wanted yet?” Vortex giggled, arms looped around his neck.

“Your attitude is unappreciated,” Blast Off snapped and dropped him aft-first onto the floor. Vortex’s manic cackles followed him down the hallway and around the corner.

**////**

Did Vortex know?

Sometimes Blast Off wondered if Vortex knew about his secret, then he firmly convinced himself otherwise. No, Vortex _couldn’t_ know. Because Vortex would never let him live it down if he did. He’d laugh at him and mock him, wow, look at you, Blast Off, fool enough to go and chase after your commanding officer! Some Decepticon you are. He’d certainly not keep it a secret.

And then he’d tell Onslaught and—

Vortex didn’t know. There wasn’t any way he did.

**////**

Crammed into the transport’s seating in between Sunstorm and Brawl as it bumped and jarred over what felt like every pothole and protruding rock the driver spotted, Blast Off ignored them and counted the minutes crawling past on his chronometer until their destination, a planetside fortress under construction and in daily need of supplies. Past ambushes on this winding, precarious route necessitated an armed escort until construction was done and energy harvesting began. There was a lottery of the Decepticons in the area to determine which suckers drew the short straw and got the unpopular chore this week. (The commanders’ names were absent. Decepticon divisions of labor deemed it scut work for the minions.)

With prolonged exposure the radiation in the planet’s atmosphere corroded Cybertronian metal; melted tires; curdled energon. It was either suit up in unwieldy protective outfits the scientists had devised to go outside for longer than an hour or sit inside behind thick transport walls to travel. Since the protective outfits prevented transformation, removing the option of flying beside the route, cons unanimously opted for the transport.

The transport bounced over another pothole. The supplies secured in place rattled.

Blast Off theorized the driver was a demon in disguise.

Skullcruncher and Brawl exchanging bad jokes (and the occasional punch) went in one audial and out the other for Blast Off. White noise. Better they had gone for that and not a contest of who had the bigger gun. It was Treadshot, Acid Storm and Darkwing’s squabbling over their favorite sports stars that tempted Blast Off to mute his audials. It had been an hour. They weren’t slowing down. In a bid to avoid learning more about sports than he already had, Blast Off leaned towards Sunstorm to listen in.

Honoring Cybertronian tradition, Sunstorm, Squeezeplay, Cindersaur, Stranglehold, and Hotlink gossiped.

One of the medics was training an MTO as their assistant in the medbay. An Autobot propagandist had vanished or died during an assassination attempt. A sub-commander had been demoted because his superior officer caught him flirting with the officer’s conjunx.

Starscream had boldly spearheaded an incursion into organic territories, seeking energon sources under Megatron’s orders: he returned empty-handed. A bright spot in that failure, Sunstorm proclaimed, was that Starscream’s unit _had_ purged one planet of its infestation and eradicated half of the teeming biological horrors on another.

The incursion had also left openings in the Seekers’ ranks. Sunstorm was going to apply for a transfer. Cindesaur told him that everybody knew Sunstorm wanted a post under Starscream one day, with how long Sunstorm had religiously used a frametype modeled like him. Sunstorm threatened to shoot him.

Three crew members on the warship were planning to host an off-duty get-together to celebrate their recent amica ceremony. This had hit a snag, Hotlink complained, because the room they had spruced up and decorated got trashed by two bulldozers kicking the bolts out of each other.

Stranglehold suggested, “Why not go to Needlenose? He’s in a great mood and he was one of those fancyaft rich types before the war, he might agree to redecorate for you if you butter him up.” He earned a stare from Hotlink.

“Why would Needlenose be in a good mood?”

“You know that Autobot who shot Needlenose down over Clemency?” The group nodded. Stranglehold mimicked a tearing motion with his hands and said, “Horri-Bull hunted the Autobot down and made a present of his head to Needlenose.” He paused. “In _public_.” Cindesaur whistled through his beak. “You should have seen the look in Needlenose’s optics, he looked like he wanted to kiss him on the spot!”

Hotlink lifted an optical ridge.

“Severed head? Is he taking a page out of Agonizer’s book?”

He was shouted down by Sunstorm and Squeezeplay.

“Shut up!”

“Don’t be so cold-sparked!”

Cindesaur said, “Wow, frag. That’s a romantic gesture, right there.”

Stranglehold nodded. Hotlink was more cynical. He twitched his wings and muttered, “Horri-Bull knows how to get laid.” Squeezeplay punched him in his shoulder.

Horri-Bull’s affair with Needlenose was one that fit social expectations of a proper courtship in the eyes of the Decepticons—violence-coated gestures, gifts of weaponry, displays of physical worthiness and mental cunning (or what passed for cunning from a dim-witted thug like Horri-Bull and a sap like Needlenose), and one in which both parties were still ultimately united in their loyalty to the Cause. They seemed… happy with each other. Blast Off smothered a flash of envy the gossip had brought up.

**////**

“I think those Autobots are _still alive_ ,” Blast Off said, craning his neck for a clearer view. “They… No, they _are_ still alive.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“I am _not_. That one body, on the side facing us. It’s still moving, even after Mixmaster welded it in place. It isn’t greyed out. The arms are twitching.”

Vortex mashed his face up against the glass of the view port, hands framing his helm on both sides. “Holy scrap. That’s impressive.” Outside, the air of Varas Centralus was thick with pollution and floating trails of embers from countless battles. But the green forms of the Constructicons as they hauled materials towards their latest building were still visible. He whistled. “A tower out of dead bodies is practical, but taking Autobots living and shoving ‘em in? Damn.”

“They’re doing _what_?” Somebody rasped from behind them.

“You wanna join them and gawk? Don’t block the doorway, Sky-Byte.” Sparkstalker jabbed the beastformer’s back and shouldered past Sky-Byte, dragging Cindesaur with him to where Flamefeather dealt out cards to the grunts at a table.

“I’m observing, not _gawking_ ,” Blast Off harrumphed.

“They’re finishing a replacement watchtower,” Vortex informed Sky-Byte. “Old one was totaled in the raid by the Dinobots.”

Sky-Byte peered through the next view port over.

“Grimlock likes to leave us mementos like that after a visit. With big property damage reports attached. His team hit my base harder than here.” The crimson light in his optics darkened. “What were you saying about the tower’s materials?”

Vortex’s engine rumbled. “You heard me.”

Sky-Byte’s words were appalled. “Hang on. They can’t be _alive_. Not like that. The Constructicons aren’t…”

“They are,” Blast Off confirmed. Blast Off threw Sky Byte a concerned if rather puzzled glance, the upper edge of his visor lifting. Why was he so visibly disturbed by this? Perhaps it was a little over the top, but… After all: “They’re Autobots. This is what you do to the enemy.” It did no good to think of enemies as mechs. It was the same principle as an assassination. Once you took the job, the target was no longer rated as a person. They were a thing, with a price tag, a last known location, and a set expiration date.

Sky-Byte didn’t argue against the point about the Autobots being enemies. But his optics remained dark.

“That ain’t right.”

Odd of him to say, after the eyewitness accounts of what his squadron had been doing at his base on Varas Centralus when the Dinobots leveled it.

“It’s creative,” Vortex corrected him. His field brightened. “I bet Hook’s going to keep them online as long as he can in there, so the Autobots will feel _bad_ about trying to shoot at the base, cuz’ they don’t want to hurt their immobilized _buddies_.”

Sky-Byte gave Vortex a dirty look. He addressed Blast Off.

“You’re a Combaticon. I need a new gun. Snarl broke my old one. Your commander told me to find one of you so you could unlock the lockers in the armory for me. Mind helping me out?”

Blast Off put a hand on his hip. “Sounds like something you’d want Brawl or Swindle for, if you need a Combaticon.”

“I’m a Combaticon too,” Vortex put in.

Sky-Byte rounded on him and spat, “You’re also a _freak_ that I wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room as if I had a say in it, Vortex.” Blast Off’s field chilled at the insult to his teammate. Vortex flashed Sky-Byte an insolent thumbs-up. Sky-Byte said to Blast Off, “Swindle was my first choice, but I can’t find him. I need a replacement before I’m deployed.”

“Very well. Follow me, if you would,” Blast Off agreed. Leaving Vortex at the view port, he led Sky-Byte to the armory and to one of the weapons lockers. Blast Off knelt to input his clearance code. He paused. “Which model do you want? Or will any functional one suit?”

Sky-Byte scratched his helm. “... I used a E02-Mark 4-12. Triple-barrelled.”

“Noted.” Blast Off stood, dusted off his knee joints, and moved to a different locker, behind a wall of boxed up armaments. Sky-Byte didn’t follow.

The floor shook. Tremors from shelling, somewhere far away.

 _Beep_. Blast Off opened the locker. Guns were lined up to the back. The model Sky-Byte requested was somewhere in here.

Sky-Byte reset his vocalizer. “Back there. You weren’t kidding.”

“About the Constructicons? No, why would I?” Blast Off rummaged in the locker. “Your reaction was strange.”

Sky-Byte emitted an aborted growling noise.

“Me! _I_ was the _strange_ one there? Look at what was happening to fellow Cybertronians!”

“Enemy Cybertronians.”

“That’s not a normal way to treat enemies.”

“It’s not?” Blast Off asked, bemused. His hands closed on the E02-Mark 4-12 model. “Have you been keeping your head in the sand? It’s been going on for awhile now. Centuries. The Constructicons aren’t breaking new ground.”

“ _You_ —”

Sky-Byte cut himself off.

The moment where it was just the noise of air cycling in and out of his filtration vents stretched.

“You’ve gone mad. Everybody on this planet has fragging lost it.” Sky Byte said conversationally, indistinctly, muffled by the locker’s metal walls and the shelling outside. “No. Everybody in this fragging _war_ has _lost it_.”

In the process of backing out of the locker with the gun, Blast Off didn’t quite catch Sky-Byte’s words. “Pardon me, did you say something? Could you repeat it?”

Closing the locker, he rounded the wall of armament boxes and handed the gun to Sky-Byte. Sky-Byte’s unnerved optics darted from Blast Off’s masked face to the gun and back up to his face again.

“Nah. It wasn’t important,” he said. Blast Off lifted his chin, an expectant edge to his electromagnetics. A lightblub went on in Sky-Byte’s helm. “Oh! Thanks. Right. Thanks for helping me out.” Blast Off nodded.

Sky-Byte fled with the gun.

The Combaticons were dispatched to fend off the Dinobots. Sky Byte was assigned to deal with a frontline assault led by Ironhide’s squad. Nothing that happened on that planet had anything to do with honor or a fair fight. It wasn’t until four decades after Veras Centralus was an ashen, radioactive mass of craters and they’d been sent to another front that Blast Off found out Sky Byte’s name had been added to the list of deserters.

**////**

A command center had been hidden near the rim of a debris disk in orbit around a pulstar. A collective push by the Autobots had hit it and the other bases in the system. After its destruction, the Decepticon forces retreated to a nearby dwarf planet. The Autobots passed it by and moved deeper into the system.

The half-destroyed station hung in the void, blown into two halves. A debris field trailed away from the wreck. Assured the coast was clear, the Decepticons on the salvage run swarmed it.

Onslaught threaded his way through the dark tunnels in the furthermost half. Blackness crawled ahead of him, darting into crannies and kept at the edge of the circle illuminated by the light-torch held aloft in Onslaught’s hand. Charred spots were evidence of the chemical fires that had sprouted up during the battle. The gravity wave generators hadn’t fully given out yet, keeping Onslaught upright and his feet on the floor. Another group was salvaging the mess hall and the common rooms. Onslaught headed towards the section of the command center where the crew’s quarters laid.

A flight of stairs opened into a gaping void instead of crew quarters so Onslaught doubled back and took a different corridor. Brawl and Swindle’s rooms were no longer attached to the rest of the station. They were part of the debris field. Onslaught’s quarters shared their fate. But Blast Off and Vortex’s rooms were intact. The access code didn’t trigger a response from the deactivated station computer systems. Onslaught peeled the door open with one hand, twisting and crumpling the metal. He slid through the opening.

Blast Off’s room matched the other private quarters he had picked through. Evacuated in a hurry while the alarms that alerted them to an Autobot raid blared, rumpled, boxes knocked open and objects scattered out of their places from the command center losing power and pitching downward. The overhead light was dark. The workstation next to the recharge slab had coolant stains on the keyboard from previous occupants.

Searching through the storage compartments revealed little that justified salvage.

Used tube of polish, a buffer, an unlabelled data stick. An old mission report draft. Items Blast Off could replace. About to leave and go through Vortex’s room, Onslaught’s foot caught on one of the overturned boxes. A bronze cube dropped out of it and rolled across the floor. Onslaught blinked.

Picking it up, Onslaught examined it.

It gleamed. No dust. No scratches. Its sides were etched with millions of tiny, curling delicate engravings. Not an inch of the cube was bare of engravings. Some of the markings were glyphs in the Primal Vernacular. Expansive, it didn’t take a genius to deduct that. Locating a square divot on the bottom, Onslaught pressed it. The cube transformed, sides folding outward like a metal flower. A holographic orb of colored light burst into view, dots representing planets and stars winking and spinning in slow motion inside it. Accessing the cube’s settings let Onslaught swipe through multiple arrays of constellations. The glowing labels were in an outdated script.

A hologram projector of solar system maps.

Careless of Blast Off, to forget to pocket this in his subspace. The shuttle was usually more vigilant about guarding his collection of antiques.

Onslaught turned the map off, transforming the cube back to how he’d found it.

There was no practical reason to take this trinket with him.

But Blast Off valued it. Blast Off had already had to give up one hobby. His second in command had cultivated crystals before the war. Early on, he had continued growing them. But resources had worn thin. A few Decepticons and Autobots had taken crystals with them after Cybertron’s lower atmosphere was destroyed. The cowards who refused to pick sides had done the same. Save for those outliers, every crystal breed was extinct. Blast Off had packed away the portable containers and the tools he had used for the hobby and simply stopped mentioning it.

It might have been on a whim, but what was the harm in returning a part of Blast Off’s remaining hobby to him?

Blast Off smiled so rarely these days.

Perhaps a recovery of his hologram projector would coax a smile out of him again.

Onslaught put the hologram projector in his subspace and climbed back into the corridor to check Vortex’s room.

**////**

Three Decepticons huddled at a table, one with her arms folded as she stayed alert while the other two stared dazedly at the table, round clamps on either side of their heads linking them to the humming simultronic machine mounted on the wall. A sporadic twitch ran through her clawed fingers.

Blast Off gave them a sidelong glance. But none of them were the con he was supposed to bring to Onslaught’s briefing.

He roused Brawl and herded him out of the dive bar, ignoring Brawl’s muttered swearing.

The next time he came, two battles later, there was one con at the table where there had once been three.

**////**

The jungle moon was a marketplace that doubled as a waystation, not a military occupation. Placed under Banzaitron’s command, the Combaticons were diverted from their previous assignment and ordered to track a traitor that had been sighted in the area.

And Blast Off caught up to the target first.

Sky-Byte was alone and restocking his ship for an interstellar trip. He must have bartered for the fuel at the waystation. Where Banzaitron’s informant had seen him.

Crouched between the vine-draped trees, the sights of his rifle trained on Sky-Byte’s back as the beastformer clambered up the ramp and into the ship, Blast Off was concealed from Sky-Byte’s range of vision. Sky-Byte just needed to walk back down the ramp…—There was his feet, his knees—

And what saved Sky-Byte from getting sniped was his bare chassis.

No Autobot brand.

Blast Off slowly lowered the rifle.

He thought of Veras Centralus.

If Sky-Byte had turned traitor, he would have killed him. But the lack of a brand showed he had only rejected the Decepticons’ payroll, not gone over to the Autobots. For that, Blast Off stayed his hand and watched the ship rocket away into space, its pilot oblivious to his brush with near-death. Let Sky-Byte flee to the edges of the galaxy. He’d get caught eventually. It didn’t need to be the Combaticons that brought him in. When Blast Off reported in through their secure channel, the lie that there hadn’t been any sightings of Sky-Byte in his search zone, same as Brawl and Vortex, was easy. It was accepted easily too.

**////**

It was Swindle’s comm that had sent Blast Off slicing through the system to a miserable, remote sector of the galaxy with another equally miserable, dingy trade outpost floated in a low-atmosphere orbit around a tiny planet of organics with no impressive resources to its name.

Even the local star was dim and dismal, providing little energy. It was completely beneath anybody’s notice, much less that of the Decepticons. No doubt the outpost itself was jammed full of more sleazy lowlifes, solely to make Blast Off suffer the indignity of sharing the same breathing space with them. Swindle’s kindred spirits across the barriers of species, if one felt like putting it crudely.

Wait, that wasn’t a completely accurate statement.

It wasn’t Swindle’s < _Hey! Blast Off! My favorite teammate! My main mech!_ > popping into his commlink that had sent him this way.

Like any Combaticon, Swindle had a distress beacon installed that he could activate at will. It was keyed to broadcast only to the frequencies of other Combaticons. But the beacon’s range was limited. Its signal could only reach them if they were in the same system as the teammate requesting aid, and this time none of them had been present in the system Swindle had been operating his latest scam on.

Stranded without credits, Swindle had been forced to bide his time and make do with the locals until he could get the funds to rig up a long-distance comm array and get back into contact with the wider galaxy.

Naturally, he had decided to call the teammate who possessed a spacefaring alt mode in hopes of a ride off the planet he’d been dumped on and avoiding the need to fill his commander in on his _newest_ mishap involving Ultra Magnus. Let’s be real, Blast Off, Onslaught was such a busy mech, he didn’t need more issues on his plate! _Surely_ Blast Off could swing by real quick and pick him up, quiet-like, get him back to Deception-controlled space, and Swindle could sort out the rest without imposing on him further, no big deal… ? He’d make it worth Blast Off’s while.

Blast Off had listened to his wheedling, nodded along in understanding at the story, and told him that yes, he would drop by and pick Swindle up soon (to Swindle’s evident pleasure) but first, he would be patching Onslaught into the comm call. He had done so, over Swindle’s ensuring groan.

After Onslaught had finished chewing Swindle out at length, a quick conference between Onslaught and Blast Off, and Onslaught’s orders had him charting a course to Swindle’s coordinates.

When he found the outpost, Blast Off pulled up in front of the small hangar where Swindle was waiting and into the docking bay. Swindle had some storage crates stacked up next to him. Blast Off spun his transformation cog and landed on the floor in his root mode. From his subspace, he produced items Swindle recognized on sight.

“Aww, c’mon, mech,” Swindle whined.

“You know the drill, Swindle,” Blast Off said without sympathy. He held up the scanners. “Onslaught’s orders. I can’t take you back to the base without checking first. It’s regulations. We can do this with you standing up or with you sitting down. Which one?”

“I’m not an amateur. I already checked! I found two tracker chips in my knee, and a few attention deflectors to hide ‘em. I got rid of them,” Swindle groused, hands on his hips as he leaned back so he could look up at Blast Off.

“Standing or sitting?” Blast Off pressed. With him being limited to the portable equipment he had on hand, it would be tedious to be thorough but thorough Blast Off intended to be. He wanted to get it done as fast as he could.

“Fine!” Swindle huffed and sat down on a bench set against the hangar’s wall.

Blast Off followed him, sat down on the bench, and set to scanning. Red light slowly knifed up and down Swindle’s frame. Swindle yammered while the first scanner searched in the infrared spectrum for hidden trackers.

“Zull? Surely you had better pickings than that,” Blast Off interrupted him mid-sentence.

Swindle looked cross, “I was in a rush! The Zullians higher-ups are chumps, but they do good business in the defense and armaments markets, and I had a favor from one of the head honchos to call in. I didn’t expect Ultra Magnus to be on my trail that early. He used to be slower.”

Swindle held out an arm as Blast Off ran the scanner over it. Its red line inched down.

“And how did you get out of the stasis cuffs this time? You didn’t mention that detail.”

“I sold out Scorponok’s little game on Nebulos,” Swindle said. “Big Blue and Righteous decided he had bigger fish to fry than lil’ old me.”

“Which law of the Tyrest Accord was he breaking this time?” Blast Off said.

“Selling Cybertronian tech to the natives.”

“... Why does he always pick the organics?”

“Fragged up tastes.”

“That does track with his personality. Left foot’s done. Right foot’s next.”

The search unearthed a hidden nano-tag applied to Swindle’s back and several more potent attention deflectors, at which Swindle had called Ultra Magnus a rude word and Blast Off had to go fishing through his subspace to find the nano-blaster to scrub it off. It was removed after Blast Off peeled off the attention deflectors. Swindle stood up, stretched, and invited Blast Off to lunch before they launched into space. While he didn’t relish socializing or the food provided on this outpost, the gauge on Blast Off’s fuel tank was low enough to make him agree. Swindle locked the hangar door behind them.

They ate lunch together in the mess hall. They talked.

It was a short trip from there to the official’s office. The Chomskian official tried to pull a gun. Blast Off got there first and put a hole through xis’ thin skull. Missing most of xis upper head and xis blood and gore splattered onto the desk and a few fleshy bits stuck to the wall behind xim, the Chomskian toppled over onto the desk. And then it started leaking. Revolting.

“I’m NOT touching that,” Blast Off said.

“Don’t need you to!” Swindle chirped sweetly, and pushed the body out of the chair and onto the floor. It thudded wetly onto the carpet. It continued to leak. He started ransacking the desk.

“Why did you want xim dead anyway?” Blast Off asked, uncaring about the murder but curious about the choice of victim. “Plenty of other people on this station to rob. Why was xe the first choice?”

“Xe tried to frag me over in business after I got stuck here,” Swindle said. “I don’t hold with that. Now, could you help me find where the vault in this office is? I know xe had one somewhere. I can crack it.”

**////**

The reek of potent engex slammed into Vortex’s sensors like a sledgehammer the instant the door swished open. In normal circumstances, the scent, the engex bottles scattered across the floor, the wheezing fans of an intoxicated body, all would have primed Vortex to anticipate helpless prey to inflict misery on. But there were only a handful of cons who knew the access code to his quarters.

Inside the gloom from the dimmed lights, the dark bulk scrawled across Vortex’s berth lifted up a helm and the purple light of a visor swam into focus.

“Whzzat?” Blast Off slurred. “Vortex? What are you doing in my room?” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I don’t want to frag right now. G-go away.”

“I should be the one saying that,” Vortex said, kicking an empty bottle out of his path. He was tempted to flip the lights back to full brightness, just to make Blast Off cringe and shield his visor, but he resisted.

“What do ya’ want?”

“You’re in _my_ room, Blasters. Again, shouldn’t I be saying that?”

“No, I’m not…” Blast Off’s voice trailed off as he re-examined his surroundings. His visor glitched, overbright. “... Oh. This isn’t my room.”

“No scrap, Solomus!”

Blast Off struggled to sit upward. “I’ll leave.”

“Take a swing at it. You’re so sloshed to your circuits you can’t triangulate your way out of a plastic bag.” Vortex draped himself onto the berth, invading Blast Off’s personal space. “What’s with the engex raid? Feeling _melancholy_?” He prodded innocently.

“I,” diverted from trying to coordinate himself into standing and wobbling out the door, Blast Off squinted, “don’t like your mind games when I’m sober. Don’t care for ‘em drunk either.”

Vortex patted his arm. “Can’t I ask after my teammate’s health without suspicions?”

“You didn’t say that with a straight face.”

“No.”

Blast Off picked up a bottle from the berth. Engex pooled at its bottom. He drained it.

“If you didn’t want me to ask, _you’re_ the one who shouldn’t have snuck in. Since when did you do binges like this?” Vortex pressed, counting on being able to take advantage of Blast Off’s levels of intoxication to make him miss the holes in the logic.

Blast Off didn’t respond right away. His gaze wandered. He looked at the empty bottle. Then at Vortex. His mouth twisted. And then his resolve to not talk about what was bothering him cracked.

"Am I ugly?" Blast Off asked. "Is that why that lunkhead overlooks...?” He rubbed his face. Ahh, Vortex’s hunch about a melancholy fit being the trigger for this was near the mark. "Or maybe… Vortex, we've fragged. Am I a bad frag?"

Vortex cocked his helm.

“No, and no.” Objective facts. Their fragging might be more fun for _Vortex_ if Blast Off was a sadist in the berth, but spacebridge-level science wasn’t needed for Vortex to understand Blast Off not sharing many of Vortex’s bigger kinks didn’t mean Blast Off was a bad lay. The shuttle knew what to do both giving and receiving, and he was obliging about considering requests when negotiating terms. Vortex lowered his rotors and feigned confusion to encourage him to keep talking.

Blast Off’s helm dipped before he jerked it up, the body cues of somebody muzzily struggling to not pass out.

"Then why?” Blast Off frowned. “I'm right here," he said wretchedly. “I’m a hands’ reach away, and he won’t.... He doesn’t… I’m...” He didn’t use any names. As if, even so thoroughly plastered Vortex knew a lightweight like Blast Off wouldn't remember a single thing of his drinking binge come morning—and come a supreme hangover—or what he was saying during it, Blast Off was still instinctively compelled to throw up at least a thin layer of plausible deniability, like the mech he was talking about wasn't obvious to both of them.

It’d be funny how much Blast Off pretended, if it wasn’t so weird and mildly pointless.

Blast Off was one of the weirdest mechs Vortex had ever met.

“I should be better than this,” Blast Off said finally and Vortex got the feeling Blast Off was talking more than just a bout of stymied lust. “I’m _supposed_ to be better than this. But I’m not.”

Blast Off was useless to pry for information after that. Too drunk.

Vortex commed Brawl. When Brawl let himself inside, Blast Off was out cold and drooling onto Vortex’s berth. Brawl hooked his thick arms under Blast Off’s wide shoulders and hefted his upper body off the slab, while Vortex grabbed his feet and heaved them up too. Between the two of them, they mechhandled him through the door and hauled Blast Off back to his quarters to sleep it off.

**////**

The bar was one of the buildings wrecked from the fighting. Six cylinders lined up on the wall behind the bar counter. Four were broken. Two were whole. Bright blue liquid shimmered inside. Since the Decepticon that had been the bartender was deactivated, the Combaticons bet the remaining engex in the bar’s distillery qualified as ‘unclaimed.’ Useful for bribes, if they split it between themselves. They just had to be the troops who pilfered it first. Swindle was outside. Brawl and Blast Off hauled a cart inside the building and around the fallen support beams.

Brawl stepped over an overturned table. His foot splashed into a pool of energon. The greyed out Decepticon under the table had been ripped in half. His helm still had a simultronic clamp leeched on it, face frozen in a vacant smile.

“Pah,” said Brawl. “Look at this one! What a weakling. Chasing a made-up fantasy like a sparkling. Musta’ not even noticed the Autobot coming to blast his head in with a rocket launcher.”

Behind the counter and unscrewing a cylinder from the wall, Blast Off sighed.

“Brawl. Use an inside voice. You don't need to shout.” And like Brawl was one to talk, with how he indulged in his drin—no, surely Brawl could control himself. “Get over here and carry the rest of the engex to the cart.”

**////**

The door to Onslaught’s office shut behind Blast Off.

Looking up from the memo he was composing on the computer to see the two cubes glowing with energon that Blast Off held, Onslaught said. “Energon? Excellent timing, Blast Off. Put mine on the desk.”

Blast Off had scripted this confession out. There were steps to it. At the next one-on-one meeting with Onslaught, he’d stop by an energon dispenser and fill up two cubes with fresh fuel. One cube for him, one cube for Onslaught. He would make his entrance, perfectly on the clock, sure of himself and ready to tackle the latest problem interfering with their neck of the army. Onslaught approved of a proactive attitude. They would discuss. Onslaught would devise a solution and if needed, give Blast Off orders to assist in making it happen.

The issue addressed, there’d be small talk. The mood would relax. Blast Off would steer the conversation, easing into it until he felt the moment was right and he could ask Onslaught if he would object to being courted.

So far Onslaught hadn’t realized on his own that the nature of Blast Off’s regard towards him had shifted.

Frustrating.

But not insurmountable.

Therefore the proper thing for Blast Off to do was offer Onslaught an unmistakable signal of his interest, in a private setting where neither he nor his commander would be shamed if Onslaught turned him down. The office was Onslaught’s territory, a concession by Blast Off to putting the control of the situation in Onslaught’s hands. He’d rehearsed his speech beforehand obsessively. It was polite. Open and dignified. Flattering, as an opening volley, without becoming a sales pitch.

Then Blast Off walked into the meeting and discovered his script had overlooked a tiny, critical element.

In reality, the prospect of dropping the pretenses and making his spark’s desires known in front of another person was _terrifying_.

To fling the evidence of his vulnerability down on the desk between them and let it sit there, where he couldn’t take it back, exposed to another’s assessment, and be able to do nothing more than hope that Onslaught might not choose to dismiss it. Blast Off was free to ask. But he recognized Onslaught was also free to refuse. To admit he had a need for Onslaught felt tantamount to confessing to weakness, something Blast Off strived to portray himself as not prone to. How did other people do this?

The courage he had plucked up evaporated.

A dose of terror weakened his knees. Blast Off couldn’t turn on his heel and sprint out the door like he wanted to, not with Onslaught looking attentively at him with that red visor. Sitting down, he put one of the cubes on the desk. “Here.”

Onslaught retracted his mask and picked the cube up to sip.

Blast Off sloshed the energon around in his cube without drinking. He reset his vocalizer. “May I ask, did Vortex do something? He said you ordered him to be confined to his room for the day.”

“Vortex disemboweled a Decepticon.”

Blast Off tried to puzzle this out. Onslaught wasn’t troubled by Decepticon-on-Decepticon fatalities. “He does that.”

“He disemboweled the _wrong one_.”

“Ah,” Blast Off said. A political misstep. No wonder Onslaught wasn’t thrilled.

The lines around Onslaught’s mouth deepened. “An ally of one of the generals, who _happens_ to be spark brothers with the third-in-command of the base that’s a necessary link in our supply chains. The general wants Vortex’s spark chamber on a platter. I won’t give it to him. Vortex’s going to be serving a stint in Skomiloch while I do damage control until cooler heads prevail. Skyquake’s interrogation team could benefit from instruction by a professional.”

Onslaught leafed through the stack of datapads and filework on his desk. Medical reports, the schematics of an apparatus designed by the scientific division crossed out in red, the current mandatory drilling schedules, a submitted proposal to increase security by welding plasma laser cannons onto the transports. Financial transactions, intelligence on the pattern of Galactic Council aggression in a neighboring sector, a note that several pieces of furniture in the common room needed replacing again, a casualty list, mission outlines, official equipment reacquisitions. Onslaught pulled out a datapad. “Before we get sidetracked, I want your feedback on organizing new patrol schedules.”

Having shot itself in the chest at the onset, Blast Off’s courage didn’t make a reappearance for the rest of the meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Several problems for the Combaticons would have been solved if Blast Off had just come clean about his feelings here. Not all, but several. But then that would butterflied away what happened to them in TAAO, so once again the IDW1 plot forces me to do the opposite of what I want.


	5. clumsy hands in a dark room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Observations from the peanut gallery.

“Sometimes I just want to kill both of ‘em,” Vortex muttered darkly, sparks leaping off the whetstone he was scraping down the business edge of one of his tools. “You know? Kill them, and be done with it. It’s been millions of years. They’re so thickheaded about this, I want to stab myself in the optics rather than watch them fumble around like two big bags of spare parts forever!”

Seated on the bench next to him, Swindle made an absent-minded sound, counting through the stack of sales receipts from smuggling illicit supplies past the blockade on Metascan Alpha. 

Vortex griped, “ _Millions_ of years. How hard can it be to put plug A into port B? It’s not rocket science.”

Down below in the command hub, Blast Off and Onslaught were performing their dance in which Blast Off tripped over his courtesies subtly hinting he wanted attention without outright _saying_ that’s what he wanted, hedging around the point, and Onslaught just as subtly misunderstood his hints, astonishingly oblivious by accident to what Blast Off was angling for. Brawl was snoring (at about the same volume as a chainsaw cutting through a lamppost) at a nearby duty station, arms behind his helm and feet propped up on the console.

It was enough to make a mech want to throw something at them and shout _get a clue, aftholes!_

“Can’t read the room. Neither of them.”

“ _Primus_.”

Swindle licked his thumb, still sorting his receipts. “And why does it matter to you if they’re no good at getting things straightened out? You’re the ‘copter fragging both of them, it’s not like you’re the one losing out here,” he pointed out. And Vortex was a visitor to Swindle’s berthroom and Brawl’s berthroom too for that matter, but they weren’t the topic at hand. It was hardly as if Vortex’s interfacing life was suffering because their leader and his second in command weren’t swapping paint.

“So? I like fragging Onslaught, but I don’t want to _court_ the mech,” Vortex scoffed. “Blast Off’s welcome to that, if he’s mad enough to sign up for it. Onslaught’s stiff-necked enough as a boss, I swear he would be overbearingly naggy as a conjunx.” Vortex’s visor scrunched up. “Onslaught’s about as romantic as a concrete block to the face.” Onslaught’s lectures were the reason Vortex had learned to recharge sitting upright with his optics online. Dozens of meetings had become opportunities to catch up on defragging while Onslaught droned on. “The mech reads dusty files of _military history_ for fun, Swin! Voluntarily!”

“Maybe Blast Off likes the challenge,” Swindle speculated.

“Challenge? Pft. Onslaught wouldn’t recognize romance if it danced the Vosian jig bareaft in front of him with its chestplates open,” Vortex said, exasperated.

“Don’t say that where Blast Off can hear you,” Swindle snipped. “It might give him ideas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before anybody asks, yes, Vortex was the first Combaticon to collect the “fucked every single one of my teammates at least once” achievement reward.


	6. want something to chase you? run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter contains material from Spotlight: Arcee. However, since I regard the original Spotlight as a deeply misogynistic, transphobic, and gross piece of writing, I have chosen to cut the worst scenes, completely ignore Furman’s interpretation and instead use the later retcons in the exRID and OP/Unicron runs. In this fic, Acree is a trans lesbian. 
> 
> If the reader wants more details, I have included a link in the end notes. If any reader prefers to skip past the section that contains Spotlight: Arcee material, it begins with the line “ _The swarm of dropships […]_ ” and ends with the line “ _The world went white._ ”

After days spent leaping through fold-space, the small group of starships, led by Banzaitron’s flagship, completed a quantum jump and blinked seamlessly into the Elba system without being detected by the enemy faction. While the quantum generators hummed and recharged, the fleet cruised onward to Garrus-9.

Inside a dropship in the belly of the flagship, Onslaught disengaged his commlink from the public frequencies and removed his hand from his audial. He addressed the Combaticons crammed into the space, each one armed, present and accounted for (minus one jeep.) “Listen up. We’re in the all-clear. Ghost shielding is holding strong, Garrus-9 has no clue we’re here. If the intel from Banzaitron’s undercover agent isn’t worthless, we have fifteen minutes before the Autobots switch from morning to mid-afternoon shift. We’ll get the drop on them then.”

“Finally!” Brawl cheered. “I can’t _wait_ to get my hands dirty.”

“Quiet. I wasn’t finished talking. Our job has been made simple for us,” Onslaught said, visor intent. “We don’t need to fight to take an inch of territory from the Autobots. We don’t need to hold this prison. We’re not here to put Garrus-9 under siege.” He gestured at the blurry hologram of six mechs displayed on the curved wall of the dropship, buzzing on and off. “The principal objective of this mission is to break out the Monstructor gestalt. _Strictly_ smash-and-grab. We force our way in, we locate them, we warp out with them.”

In the pilot’s seat, Blast Off fed a fresh round of ammunition into his blaster’s barrel.

Vortex asked, “Think this gestalt is the real thing and not just a phony to lure us into a trap?”

Onslaught’s response was deadpan. “It’s real enough that our commanding officer is about to throw a sizable amount of mechpower and ships at it until he gets his new toy. It’s up to us to pull that off.” He deactivated the hologram.

Vortex clattered his blades. “Got’cha.”

Ten minutes later, as they awaited the signal to attack, the conversation drifted off topic and devolved into a heated debate.

“Who’d you rather fight, five Snaptraps or ten Astrotrains?” Brawl asked seriously.

“Ten Astrotrains,” Vortex said promptly.

“Five Snaptraps,” Blast Off said.

Vortex threw up his hands. “Why would you do that? If you have to pick between fighting a bunch of smart ‘cons and a bunch of dumb ones, go for the _dumb_ ones! You can trick them into fighting each other!”

“Astrotrain can fly, Snaptrap can’t,” Blast Off countered without hesitation. “I could stay in the upper atmosphere and eliminate them from afar at my leisure.”

Brawl rubbed his chin. “But what if they hid underground from you? Like, in caves? Tunnels? You wouldn’t be able to get at ‘em.”

“They wouldn’t be able to shoot at me either. I could taunt him into revealing himself.”

“You sure?”

“I could!”

“How about a choice between fighting…” Vortex interrupted, “—Fifty Buzzsaws or three Impactors?”

“Buzzsaw, duh,” Brawl answered. “I’d just swat all the little pests if they got close. Shoot the rest who didn’t.”

“Buzzs—hold up,” Blast Off held up a hand. “Would Soundwave know I was the one who killed them if I won?”

Vortex pondered. He settled on, “He’s Soundwave. He would.”

Blast Off shook his helm. “I’m changing my answer. I’d prefer to fight Impactor.”

The more inane the direction the chatter to pass the time went, the more exasperated the fluctuations of Onslaught’s muted field became. He had bowed out of the familiar game a few minutes in order to keep watching the clock, but despite the lack of discipline, the truck made no move to tell his subordinates to pipe down.

“Five Killmasters or one Jazz?” Blast Off posed the question to the rest of the team.

“Five Killmasters,” chorused Vortex and Brawl in unison. They broke off into their separate reactions.

“Fighting multiples of a Warrior Elite has _slightly_ better odds than trying to kill a mech like _Jazz_ solo,” Vortex hissed.

“Jazz is one of those glitches who stab you in the back instead of fighting head on!” was Brawl’s opinion.

A shipwide transmission being sounded eventually cut the debate short.

The swarm of dropships plummeted towards the prison and battle broke out.

Under Garrus-9’s bright red sky, their dropship barrelled past the cover fire being pumped out from the gun emplacements and the defending troops, and crashed into one of the blast doors blocking a side entrance, prongs transforming out from its sides to puncture the door and lock it in place. Concussion blasts and shouting rattled around them. Blast Off flipped the right switches and pressed a release button to activate the drill apparatus in its front to bore through the blast door. Once they were out and clear of the blast zone’s radius, Brawl would remotely detonate the explosives he had wired into it and bring down the blast door it had breached, widening the opening for other Decepticons. The Combaticons wouldn’t be using the dropship as their escape route.

“Combaticons—move in!”

Onslaught was the first one to exit with a battle cry, the other three Decepticons spilling into the corridor behind him. They fell into a loose formation, Onslaught in the front and Blast Off guarding the rear while Vortex and Brawl covered the sides.

Blast Off didn’t divert much of his attention to the words Brawl and Onslaught were exchanging as they charged the Autobots. Typical energon-pumping gabble.

There was an active combat zone outside as the Decepticons did their part to overrun the enemy. The other assault teams on the inside of the stronghold would be splitting up to prevent the Autobots from concentrating their defenses all in one spot, where the target was held down in the rehabilitation center in the basement of the stronghold. They’d be swarming into the northern dome and its accompanying wing, maybe let out some of the Decepticon prisoners, while the other teams attempting to smash the main power grid and the generators that maintained the lattice field would hopefully give the Autobots a scare about the attackers trying to open the path for another wave of reinforcements to swoop in and hammer them.

Distractions, meant to draw the guards away from the Combaticons.

< _Did they hafta’ put those slaggers in the aftend of their basement?_ > Brawl kneed the Autobot that had jumped him in the midsection and sent them sprawling to the floor. Before they recovered, he smashed their helm in. < _Don’t get me wrong, I like all the extra guards to bust up, but this would be faster if they were on the main floor._ >

Vortex dodged laserfire lancing through the corridor at them.

< _It’s called a security measure. It’s_ supposed _to make life harder for us._ >

< _Less talking, more shooting._ > Onslaught instructed over the secure channel.

< _You don’t need to tell me twice, boss!_ >

The team slaughtered their way down the corridors. Blast Off took each shot clean and precise, uninterested in delaying the moment of termination, and each one ripped through circuitry. Each caused an Autobot to crumple like a puppet with its strings cut. Pockets of resistance mobilized and met them, slowing them down from punching through to the basement. Alarms whooping added to the racket, striping the passageways with flashing lines of red.

After cracking a guard in the jaw with the muzzle of his blaster, Onslaught slammed their twitching frame into the wall, their spark already fading.

“Onslaught,” Blast Off called, having dismantled the control panel to the locked door at the end of the corridor and plugged himself in. He disconnected from the panel and retracted his cable. “There’s only two adjoining rooms between us and the target. Multiple Autobots have barricaded themselves into the rehabilitation center.”

“It must be the remaining guards and the scientists,” Vortex deduced.

Onslaught stepped to the side. “Brawl. You’re up. We’re not stopping here.”

Brawl’s lack of a visible face didn’t hinder him from broadcasting his murderous eagerness. Flipping down into alt mode, he aimed his cannon square at the door and rolled forward. The other three mechs flattened themselves to the wall.

The Combaticons piled through the resulting wall of smoke and melted slag. Laserfire greeted them from the angry Autobots standing guard. The door locked behind the other mechs was helpfully, in case a visitor to the prison’s basement was wondering if they had gotten lost, labelled **REHABILITATION**.

“Jackpot!” Brawl hollered and made a spirited effort at running over one of the two identical red Autobots. Blast Off dropped back to cover the rear.

< _Don’t let your guard down_ ,> said Onslaught, keeping up a stream of returning fire. < _Cornered mechs aren’t to be taken lightly._ >

Vortex chimed in. < _Let’s avoid a repeat of that Autobot prisoner escaping execution because he tricked you into thinking his T-cog was broken so you didn’t need to put an inhibitor band on him. Blast Off had to off him for you._ >

Brawl shot a Technobot in the joint between arm and shoulder. < _Only once! Everybody slips up sometimes!_ >

By the time they were clambering over the tangle of bodies and through the last doorway they had to break through, the previous room was in ruins, small electrical fires licking at monitoring screens, and the open exchange of shared laserfire was dwindling. It was down to the Combaticons being barely held at bay by a motley huddle of two guards, a couple of grim-opticked engineers and Technobots not so injured they couldn’t keep fighting, and the head scientist—what was his name? Ah. Right, Jetfire. That was the head scientist. The group was pinned up against the far wall, right near the six combiner units they were after, using the consoles and stacks of supplies as makeshift shelter. Jetfire was barking frantic orders.

< _There’s nowhere for them to run now_ ,> said Blast Off.

< _Are the targets even alive? They’re not moving._ > Keenly attuned to others displaying fear or dismay, Vortex was quick to comment on the combiner units’ lack of reaction to the struggle raging.

< _I’ve scanned their energy signatures,_ > Onslaught answered. < _They’re online_.>

Some of the Autobots were messing with the network of cables crisscrossing the floor and dangling from the ceiling where the defenders were pinned.

A blast from Brawl knocked down two of them. Another attack nailed a guard in the chest and left a gaping hole Blast Off could see the equipment behind the guard through. The guard keeled over.

The Combaticons advanced. “Move in for the kill,” Onslaught commanded.

Jetfire didn’t let up his attempts to hold them off. Seeing the head scientist hadn’t given up, the Autobots that could still stand followed the shuttle’s example. Cruelly, Blast Off derided them. “You’ve driven yourself into a dead end. Continue to defy us if it makes you feel better. That little bit of futile defiance, satisfying though it might be for you to act out, will make no—”

A sword jammed itself through the slab of resistance offered by his internals and kept going until it protruded out the other side. His arms reflexively jerked.

“—Difference.” Blast Off looked down in surprise at the sword abruptly sprouting from the center of his chassis. He hadn’t heard anybody come up from behind him nor picked them up on his proximity sensors. “Oh.”

As abruptly as it had appeared, the flaming sword vanished. Had somebody pulled it out?

The floor rushed up. It clobbered him in the face.

Things became confusing after that. Collapsed on the floor, Blast Off’s vision glitched out. Blast Off vaguely heard the other Combaticons wheeling around to face the newcomer and sounds of gleeful and indiscriminate destruction being wrecked by whoever was that mech who had attacked him, Vortex shouting, more laserfire, the familiar clicking of Onslaught’s transformation sequence. Explosions. More voices. Somebody was angry.

Blast Off scrabbled at the floor, unsteadily forcing himself up on a knee, his hand braced on the floor. He lurched upwards. White hot pain burst from where he’d been impaled. It made him stumble and fall over, this time on his side. His blaster. He’d dropped his blaster. Where...

Far-away gruesome sounds. The _thrum_ of Onslaught discharging his cannons.

Voices, growing fainter.

Then amidst the bedlam, somebody limped towards him. Blast Off groaned. An Autobot coming to finish him off?

But the hand snagging his back tailfin to prevent him from moving wasn’t hostile.

“Told ya’ everybody slips up sometimes. Frag, a chest wound? Hang on there,” Brawl wheezed wetly, something loose and rattling in his chest. Stickiness seeped down Brawl’s torso. Blast Off clutched at his smaller teammate blindly, relief overriding his aloof facade.

Brawl locked one arm under Blast Off’s knees and another arm curled around his teammate’s back. Brawl heaved him up and dragged him to where the others were. Blast Off put an arm around his shoulder to avoid being dropped. Recalibrating his visor brought the room back into focus. Onslaught was shooting at a sleek, morbidly pink hovercar to keep the hovercar at bay, the rest of the Autobots were scattered about the room or dead, and Vortex had popped open a panel on his chest and hooked himself up to one of the restraints containing the combiner units. Each of the combiner units had a purple warp beacon slapped somewhere on their frames. The helicopter typed speedily. Must be entering their coordinates so the flagship would set up the remote control link and trigger it to teleport them out. Transforming back to root mode, Onslaught’s blaster covered Brawl’s back until he and Blast Off had rejoined them.

The air brightened. Tingled. The flagship had locked onto the coordinates Vortex was transmitting.

Jetfire gasped a protest from the console he had taken shelter behind.

Blast Off lifted his helm. Much too late to stop them, Fortress Maximus skidded through the burning rubble where the door to the room had been, armed and furious. “ _Nobody move!_ ”

The sensation of teleportation enveloped them.

“Tell me,” Vortex sneered, devoid of playfulness, “Does that line _ever_ work?”

The world went white.

**////**

Heavily wounded himself, Brawl sank to the floor in a corner of the hangar and onto his knees, arms trembling from exertion. Blast Off gripped green plating. The transition from a battlefield to a ship was jarring. The ceiling spun. “I’m going to—purge—”

Brawl unceremoniously dumped Blast Off out of his arms. Urk. Another dent. Blast Off rolled over, retracted his mask, energon drying on his chin, and heaved out his tanks. He snapped his mask on again. Not inclined to stress the pain in his internals further, he laid there, fans whirling in the aftermath of combat.

“Do we need to ring for a medic right now?” Vortex’s voice floated from above.

Blast Off levered himself up on his elbows. He hacked out, “The Autobot came close, but the sword missed my spark.” And his spinal strut, luckily. Damage reports coming from his systems promised the host of other struts, wires, and deep protoform the sword had seared through like a knife parting wax would be stranding him on a medical berth for a while anyway. He lowered his volume. “I’d like medical attention soon. I don’t think I can walk without tearing something vital. Not… Not an immediate emergency.”

On his knees, hands clamped onto the gashes oozing on his torso and covered in soot, Brawl spat internal fluid and said hoarsely, “Me neither. And Arcee didn’t stab me as bad.”

Brawl’s outer armor beat out Blast Off’s armor in thickness and resistance to battlefield damage. Better defenses, intended to fend off blasters rather than meteors. It made sense he could endure instead of being knocked down for the count like Blast Off.

“Arcee?” So that was who the small hovercar had been! To unleash an unstoppable warrior like that— Blast Off’s optical ridges rose. “Primus. The Autobots _truly_ did go to extreme lengths to try and stop us from stealing the gestalt from them.”

“And they failed anyway.” Walking into their corner, Onslaught entered the conversation.

“Did we obtain the target?” Blast Off checked.

“Yes. Mission accomplished.” Onslaught nodded towards the center of the hangar, where he had been speaking to the other officers. Banzaitron and his subordinates were escorting the gestalt, six pairs of wrists bound in stasis cuffs, to elsewhere on the ship. Other Decepticons, the ones that had survived and made it back to the retreating fleet, were shuffling around or being put onto stretchers. “We’re exiting the Elba system now. There’s sufficient power in the quantum engines to jump us to the Zuska sector. A Decepticon-controlled area. It’ll require another stop at a space station to refuel to cover the rest of the distance to base.”

Cooling fans laboring, Blast Off gingerly sat up. “Good.”

Onslaught knelt down and looked him over. Impromptu examination conducted, he stood up. “This is why I keep telling you to practice close combat more, Blast Off. But first, let’s get you to a medic. Immediately.”

“Tsk! Excuse me for not having optical sensors installed into the back of my head,” retorted Blast Off. Close range fighting on the ground was Brawl’s speciality, not his. “Arcee missed my spark. I’m not going to deactivate within the next hour.”

“Medbay. Now.” Onslaught’s tone brokered no argument. “Arcee might have missed, but there’s still a risk of damage done to the other spark-vital systems. The sooner that’s caught and repaired, the better.”

Vortex cast Blast Off a sly look out of the corner of his visor.

His teammate failed to notice. Blast Off’s shoulders hunched briefly. “Yes, sir.”

Conduit, a grounder medic, approached with a stretcher hovering at his side, summoned by a demanding ping from Onslaught.

Sternly, Onslaught jerked his helm. “You too, Brawl.”

While Blast Off was being loaded into the stretcher, Brawl kept his hands pressed over his injuries and protested, preferring to put off medical attention due to the unpopularity of the minibot in charge of the medbay. “Frag that! I don’t want to. Scalpel’s creepy. And _annoying_. Can’t I wait until he’s off-shift?”

“I don’t give a _scrap_ what you want. Do it now.”

“Ugh.”

In the end, Brawl went with Blast Off to the flagship’s medbay, but to the tank’s relief, his repairs were assigned by Conduit to another one of Scalpel’s assistants. Conduit took the task of Blast Off’s repairs upon himself. Moved from stretcher to medical slab, Blast Off watched Conduit’s black fingers pluck a tool off the equipment tray next to Blast Off’s slab and braced for unpleasantness.

**////**

Moving in twos and threes, the Decepticons came to peer through the distorting glow of the forcefields enclosing the components inside their detention cells. The components were separated when not undergoing testing to prevent the gestalt from combining.

The Combaticons were no less susceptible to curiosity.

Megatron’s funneling of resources into the development of combiner technology that was feasible for military usage had so far yielded a grand total of zero functional combiners. And yet, here a gestalt was, out of the blue, proven to be able to work as advertised. How could they pass over a chance to sight-see?

Talk from the scientists in the research division filtered to the rest of the base through reliable sources.

According to the information from the undercover agent, Monstructor could speak without prompting. For a given value of ‘speak.’ He could make mangled sentences and he could grasp the meaning behind words when he was spoken to. Monstructor’s individual components did not demonstrate the same initiative. They _could_ talk, but the components sounded exactly the same, synchronized in unnatural unison. Volume, speech patterns, tone, choice of insults: there was no variation. It was as if one mech with six bodies was talking, not a group of mechs.

There was something else. Something was... _wrong_ about them. They could fuel if energon was put in front of them by Scalpel’s assistants, but the tests uncovered no sense of specific preferences, no conflicting likes, no expressed dislikes. The red winged component didn’t brawl with the black component over who got to fuel first. The purple component didn’t kick the teal and red component out of the best sleeping spot. They could use technology and man consoles, but they required either a collective decision or outside orders for direction. When not following orders, they opted to mill around or claw at the walls, but little else.

Flattery and mockery alike didn’t seem to penetrate.

It had required Scalpel (as enchanted by his findings as he was frustrated by his inability to expose the secrets behind a gestalt’s workings) peeling open one of their helms while he was experimenting on the sedated component to look at the processor and identify the cause. It wasn’t just the group’s spark bond that had changed them. Cranial alterations. A primitive precursor to mnemosurgery. Parts cut out and circuitry rearranged like a madmech on syk had been at it with a screwdriver and a briefcase of hacker’s tools even Vortex wouldn’t touch. Reprogramming altered deep coded software, nigh impossible for the scientists to distinguish what changes had been made in order to facilitate combination versus the ones that had been done for no greater cause than because the gestalt’s manufacturer could, because their manufacturer hadn’t cared about preserving their comfort or sanity, and nobody had stopped him.

Monstructor was a prototype and like most prototypes, its parts were badly flawed.

Seeing the empty optics of the beastformer sitting on the floor of his cell, gazing at the wall with no reaction to the Decepticons staring at him like an exhibit in a zoo, Blast Off could believe the theory that Shockwave’s teacher had lobotomized this gestalt’s free will on purpose.

“Rumor has it Banzaitron is yet to contact Shockwave and tell him that he’s acquired a gestalt from the Autobots,” remarked Blast Off. “Is there truth to that?”

Onslaught chuckled.

“Banzaitron, reluctant to give up his shiny new toy? He’d be offended if you accused him of it.”

“I’d enjoy seeing him blow a fuse, but I’ll remember to not ask him to his face.”

“It’s not just Shockwave that Banzaitron is neglecting to send an update to. He’s doubled the level of monitoring on all communications to any member of High Command. You already know he’s ordered the cons on-base to keep it under wraps, _ostensibly_ so it’ll be harder for the Autobots to track which base we have the combiner secured in.” Onslaught kept his tone deceivingly mild. “In fact, it hasn’t escaped my attention that he hasn’t even disclosed to _Megatron_ his good fortune.”

Blast Off’s visor brightened. “It’s been weeks. Megatron would want to be informed of a new combiner within a day of their capture. To delay this long—that could be viewed as bordering on treason.“

“Megatron _has_ put Decepticons on the list for lesser offenses.”

Blast Off thinned his lips behind his mask. “Is Banzaitron getting greedy?”

Onslaught looked at the component in the cell. The forcefield buzzed.

“He wants a pet monster for himself. Despite being a _devoted_ Decepticon, he realized the moment Monstructor is delivered to Shockwave’s labs for study, the chances he’ll get the combiner back under his thumb drops into the negatives.” Onslaught clicked his glossa. “Not that he has the combiner units under his thumb to begin with. Scalpel’s reports at the meetings have revealed no solution to making that slobbering thing follow his orders once combined. Banzaitron was disgruntled.”

Onslaught tapped a finger on the forcefield, producing a sizzling noise from metal meeting energy. Sparks spewed from the point of contact. The component didn’t move.

“It’s a pity that the process destroys the individuals’ minds. If the process could be perfected so we wouldn’t need to sacrifice six capable soldiers for an insane, uncontrollable monster like this that’s just as likely to attack their allies as their enemies, I could think of a number of ways a combiner would be a decisive military advantage.” The truck’s engine rumbled, low and deep. “As the process stands now, it’s too flawed to be worth it.”

Onslaught took his leave, but crowded in front of the next cell over, Brawl, Vortex, and Swindle stayed. Blast Off walked to stand next to Brawl. Vortex had shucked off the orange paintjob he’d adopted during his stay in Skomiloch with Skyquake’s team and decked himself out in grey and blue again. The red glow from the forcefield matched his red visor. (Blast Off was of the opinion Vortex’s blue went better with grey plating. But Vortex hadn’t asked for his opinion and so Blast Off didn’t give it.) Brawl’s injuries from Garrus-9 had healed two weeks ago: his torso didn’t show weld marks. Swindle had returned a week ago from doing business with Lockdown and this was his first time seeing the components with his own optics.

Vortex was amused, saying, “—And the first thing that crosses your mind when you saw these moldy old relics was ‘ _can I sell this to somebody_?’”

“You’re the same as ever, Swindle,” Blast Off said. “You’ll have to talk them into letting you in the _labs_ before you can look at the tech. Banzaitron wants to keep a lid on it. And Scalpel has failed to crack the code to it so far.”

“I’m persuasive! Charming, even.” Swindle flashed his con-mech smile and huffed, optics on the prize. “If I can get my hands on it or just study the gestalt’s modifications for a couple days… Do you know much _money_ combiner technology would go up on the black market for, if you can prove you can replicate it?”

Brawl growled.

“Why would people pay for tech that drives you bonkers? Who cares how much of a power-up it is, Onslaught says Monstructor wouldn’t listen to anybody. He’s too messed up in the processor.”

Swindle waved Brawl’s comment off. “Well, yeah. Okay. Obviously the current tech’s got some _serious_ kinks that need to be ironed out. So to speak. Scalpel thinks too small, that’s his problem. This is what the product testing stage is for, fixing the malfunctions when they come. Weeding out the duds! _And_ I can sell the used dud combiners to customers who don’t know better at a discount. Or if I ditch the mental merge part altogether, if it’s too much trouble to fine-tune... If only that’s needed is a physical merge, I could get out of the testing stage and skip to the profit stage that much faster...”

Annnd Swindle was off, dreaming up ideas to cut corners and hustle people.

Blast Off decided to leave him to it.

Banzaitron’s base of operations was on a planet deep behind the Decepticon frontlines. The fortress itself was surrounded by miles of fungi-choked organic vegetation and acid swamps, pale liquid running down gnarled and massive tree trunks and dripping off branches into hissing and bubbling pools. Toxic fumes curled off the tops of rivers. Clouds covered the green sky. Oversized ferns and pasty blue pus-filled bulbs (which exploded if ruptured as Swindle had discovered with a shrill squeal when he’d swerved in alt mode to avoid running into Brawl’s rear and driven over a clump on a road by accident) growing below the forest canopy gave off sickly colored light to attract strange insectoid creatures.

Storms blowing in from the west turned dirt roads and swamps alike into muddy quagmires, swelling the swamp’s waters until the banks broke and floods washed through the trees. The acidity levels were harmless to Cybertronians who went wading through it but combined with the humid air and the cool temperatures, frequent baths were needed to ward off peeling and cracked paint.

Global surveys for convertible fuel sources indicated the whole planet would be undergoing an ice age within the next two thousand years. Nighttime dusted the windows with frost that melted by the afternoon.

And one night, Monstructor’s fist tore through the frosted-over side of the fortress like it was tinfoil and the rest of him followed into the open air and the cold moonlight.

The Decepticons had succeeded in nabbing Monstructor from Garrus-9.

They didn’t succeed in stopping the combiner from escaping them.

A bodycount was performed afterwards only because it was necessary for estimating how many Decepticons were alive to embark on the mission to hunt down the combiner and put that to rights. The grey frames were dragged from what was left of the eastern half of the fortress after Monstructor trashed it and tossed into a heap with the rest. The bodycount was complicated by the fortress’s location. Mechs were dispatched to splash into the filmy swamp waters and fish out the pieces of the dead floating in it to identify them. One of them found Conduit’s helm and his arm lodged in a raised tangle of tree roots. A fish was nibbling on the arm’s fingers. Conduit had been the one on duty in the research division tonight.

Roused from their recharge by the commotion of Monstructor’s break-out like the rest of the off-duty mechs in the western half of the fortress, the Combaticons joined in. The injured were found and handled (taken to the medics if treatable; put out of their misery if beyond treatment.) The Decepticons not fanning out over the rubble gathered in disorderly clusters, fetching weapons and equipment. Ships wheeled out of the fortress’ hangar.

On the edge of the giant hole unfurling from the ruins, Banzaitron and Arcee stood. Blast Off at his heels, Onslaught strode to them and stood at attention. He saluted.

“Sir. Stratotronic and Gutcruncher finally pinpointed Roadblock,” Onslaught reported, naming Banzaitron’s second in command, last seen getting punted screaming into the air by an enraged combiner’s foot. “He’s dead. His body was caught by a current and dragged downriver so that’s why it wasn’t immediately evident he was one of the casualties.”

Banzaitron’s yellow optics blazed. His right optic had a crack.

“By Vector Sigma. Of all times for that rust-streak to get himself killed!” His battered plating bristled before it settled back. “A trivial setback. Onslaught, since Rockblock’s position has been vacated and you’re the next highest ranking officer in the area, I’m promoting you to my second in command. Take over preparations for Monstructor’s recapture. I want every able-bodied Decepticon here on it.”

There was a deliberate pause from Onslaught.

“Your orders are understood, sir. It’ll be done. And what of the Autobot?”

“Our goals temporarily align, _Decepticon_ ,” Arcee rested the tip of a sword on the ground, her smile as sharp as the edge of its blade. The sword’s glow lit the planes of her face from below. “We want the same person dead. We can go back to slinging gunfire at each other some other day.”

Banzaitron offered no disagreement with her retort. “Acree’s also looking for the ones who took Monstructor.” Wind whistled through the giant hole in the fortress. “I didn’t recognize them. Two mechs. They’re not Decepticons. Neither of them were in my files.”

Not Decepticons, and if Arcee was hunting them… most likely not Autobots either.

Blast Off pitched in, “A third party is interfering then.”

Banzaitron’s hand curled into a fist.

“Yes. She knows the thieves’ identities, but not where they have gone. We implanted tracker chips in Monstructor’s six components, so _we_ know where to go. Due to this, Arcee has agreed to work with us, so we might both get what we want.”

Onslaught regarded Arcee skeptically. Only a fool wouldn’t be wary of a fighter with her reputation, and he hadn’t forgotten how the Combaticons’ recent confrontation with her in the prison had played out, even when they had outnumbered and outmaneuvered her. They had won. It hadn’t been an easy victory. “Your skills would be a considerable asset in battle. Except I don’t see a single reason why you wouldn’t turn on us at the first opening you see, and that’s the last thing we need in a fight,” he said.

Arcee was unfazed.

“We have a shared enemy. Why would I waste my time on being _petty_ when I could be sitting down with Jhiaxus and explaining to him it’s high time somebody corrected the crime against the galaxy at large that is his continued functioning? That’s the guarantee you’re getting from me, Onslaught. Take it or leave it.”

The light in Onslaught’s visor narrowed. “Pragmatic. Very well. I withdraw my objection. We’ll bring the big guns along for the trip too.”

Towering over Onslaught from behind, Blast Off watched her with trepatitation. Arcee had a singularly alarming look etched on her face, like a cyberhound that finally had its prey in sight and murder on its processor. Bloodlust radiated off her in waves.

Blast Off wasn’t keen on working alongside the mech, but orders were orders.

The conversation turned to mission logistics.

Banzaitron had proven oblivious to it, the idiot, but Blast Off _knew_ Onslaught. He knew that deliberate pause had meant, the tiny flicker-and-miss-it sparkbeat of smugness only Blast Off had been standing close enough to pick up in his field, even as Onslaught conferred with Banzaitron about fuel reserves and departure times.

Arcee wasn’t the only one with ambitions as to just how much energon would be spilled for a personal agenda in the near future.

**////**

There had been a budding civilization on Rotan once. A mountain-sized asteroid hurtling down and colliding with the planet’s surface had put an end to that. The universe’s random whims were indifferent to the thousands of years of long development by the tiny organisms crawling over the surface of a dirtball. The impact’s fallout rendered the species extinct and boiled away the seas to dried rock, leaving the desolate remains of their cities and temples to linger on a planet where every day dawned with triple sunrises and sank into dusk with triple sunsets as the system’s three stars dipped below the horizon line. There was no vegetation on Rotan. Clouds of birds dipped and swirled in masses over crumbling, brown buildings, cawing and cawing.

They’d expected the thieves to hide the combiner, but Monstructor was standing on the empty stone plaza in front of one such temple like a remarkably odd and out-of-place statue, in the open air between the broken pillars.

A bird landed on his shoulder, a tiny speck pecking at the metal.

Monstructor didn’t twitch.

“Jhiaxus’s put him on guard duty,” Arcee said, prowling restlessly around the bridge, a hate-filled comment backed up by the flagship’s scanners pinpointing a strange energy clump stationed eighty meters behind Monstructor, in the temple.

Everyone on the bridge who wasn’t a high ranking officer stayed a healthy distance away from her. As extra insurance, Swindle sneakily maneuvered himself so Vortex happened to be standing between him and Arcee when he could. (Serve long enough in a faction with the likes of Overlord and one learned to identify which Cybertronians were as liable to lop your limb off when they were in a mood as they were to talk to you.)

None of the Decepticons had come to Rotan for what Monstructor guarded.

The birds fled the area in droves when the Decepticons launched their attack, Combaticons in the lead, the birds’ squalling drowned out by the shooting.

When Monstructor toppled onto the plaza, knees putting craters into the stone, and splintered apart, the temple’s front was riddled with blast marks and shrapnel from carpet bombing. Acree had already vanished with an Autobot that had somehow sneaked in halfway through the attack and taken a few potshots at the combiner, the strange energy clump was gone too, and most of the Decepticons that had charged the combiner had acquired more dents and broken struts than they had started with, and Banzaitron was dead.

In the middle of the chaos, nobody had seen what had taken Banzaitron down. With his frame crushed into unrecognizable scrap by Monstructor’s foot repeatedly stomping on him, nobody would be able to pick out if it might have been, for instance, a cannon discharging into his side that had put him stumbling into the path of Monstructor’s killing blow or if it had been just bad luck that had Banzaitron take a wrong step during the fight and be introduced to the bottom of a giant foot, at least six times, in quick sequence. It was a mercy that Banzaitron wouldn’t have survived the second stomp, much less felt the following four.

Banzaitron wasn’t the only Decepticon Monstructor had sent to rejoin the Afterspark in the battle. More grey and crushed frames slumped against walls or draped over sunwashed rubble.

“As Banzaitron’s second in command, leadership now falls to me.” Onslaught took over in the power vacuum created by Banzaitron’s death. “The target is ours. Put the gestalt in stasis cuffs. Relay a message to Lord Megatron about Monstructor’s capture. We’re pulling out.”

Rotan shrank into a dot in space behind them.

The ships sped away from it.

“The implications of the break-out are... disturbing,” Onslaught confided to Blast Off. They were inside the quarters reserved for the highest-ranking Decepticon aboard the flagship, where privacy was a more secure element. “I’m sending him to High Command. None of Banzaitron’s delaying nonsense. Whatever sleeper code allowed Jhiaxus to hijack Monstructor, let Shockwave deal with it. I’d prefer it be his problem and not ours.”

And in doing so, curry favor and claim all the credit for Monstructor’s acquisition for himself while both robbing Banzaitron of more than a crumb of his postmortem credit _and_ neatly avoiding any responsibility should another break-out occur. If Onslaught needed to, it would be a snap to ruthlessly paint Banzaitron as a loyal but incompetent commanding officer who had developed tunnel vision in his last days and made a series of blunders in corralling his latest asset and gotten his subordinates killed in stupid ways, forcing Onslaught to step in to clean up his mistakes and salvage the operation.

Blast Off admired the ploy.

**////**

Blast Off wasn’t in the upper atmosphere when he was shot down by an Autobot flightframe. That probably saved his life. He had been above cloud level, dodging the blasts lacing the area and circled in the wrong direction at an unlucky moment. The arc of light had slashed into his alt mode’s main engines, damaging two and the third catching fire before exploding and causing additional problems. A jolt travelled down his fuselage. The damaged engine roared and failed. Blast Off’s flight path wobbled, then gave up altogether.

Gravity asserted itself.

Plunging down, snow flurries whipping around him, gaining the speed of an uncontrolled descent, trailing smoke, Blast Off tried to tune out the other Combaticons screaming at him, a flood of demands to _pull up, pull_ up _, stop, tell us what got hit, who was the attacker, bolthead, unbuckle the harnesses, let us out, go up, ah, slag, what’s going on, stop, Blast Off? Blast Off! Blast Off! Pull up! It’s an order! Pull up now!_ Did they think he didn’t _want_ to pull up? It was infuriating and _distracting_ , when Blast Off needed every drop of concentration he could scrape together over the damage alerts and warnings blinking and blurring past on his HUD to execute a hasty crash landing without any of his passengers getting killed. He couldn’t let them out, not from this height. Grounders. If they fell, they all would die, except for Vortex.

Remaining inside his alt mode, he could shield them from the worst of the impact.

A frigid white expanse yawned wider and wider.

Ice planet. Full of glaciers. This battle was happening over an ice field. He was going to smash into an ice field.

His team continued to shout. Primus. He did not need their _yowling_ in his _audials_ , and he wished Onslaught in particular would _shut the frag up_ , for five damn minutes, because his voice ringing in Blast Off’s helm was so loud that it was drowning out the sound of Blast Off’s own thoughts. Not helping!

Landing gear. He needed to get both sets of his landing gear extended. Trigger it. Main landing gear down, locked. Flare elevons on his wings. Slow down. Can’t regain control.

White expanse, getting bigger. Small hills, frozen boulders. Snow. Strong winds.

Secondary landing gear down, locked.

Sno—

Blast Off blacked out.

Consciousness seeped back with the beat of hands banging on his nosecone. Noises. Didn’t understand them. Melting snow and wetness. Trickling in. Ice. Coolant. Energon. Hot metal, somewhere close.

He tried to vent air into his systems and received a storm of error notifications. Wind gusted into cracks and chilled them. Cold blistered his inner circuitry. He was so dizzyingly cold that it went straight to his struts. It _hurt_. Blast Off tried to voice this. His speakers weren’t functioning. Or disconnected?

His systems were firing off displeased readouts. Blast Off tried to understand them. Coolant lines leaking, limbs missing, cracked heat shielding, glitched system reports. He was getting more errors from where his left wing used to be. His energon was freezing into a crust the moment it hit the air.

What were those noises?

“—he’s—ot resp—ding—”

“—don’t stop.”

Who was talking?

Somebody was poking about inside his flight deck.

“—is spark—”

“Ons—”

“—nsform!”

“—slag-sucking, exhaust-chewing—fender-licking scrap-for-brains ventwipe!”

“Swindle, hold—”

“—calling for—clamp the energon li—”

Hands smacked at him. Shoving him? Rude.

Blast Off could see a part of his cargo hold wall jabbing out of a snowbank two meters away. Shouldn’t that be attached to him? It wasn’t now. His landing gear had snapped off too. A wheel was half-buried in the snow three feet away. The trench Blast Off had bounced through and plowed into the ice field stretched out from behind him.

It was cold.

Maybe if he went to sleep for a little bit, it would stop being cold… That would be nice. If only they would stop being so loud…

“—move. We can’t if yo—”

“—Not ideal… —he weather—”

“—TRA—ORM!”

“This _blasted_ —”

Consciousness ebbed, beckoning him to somewhere far away from the ice and the damage alerts. Only for a little bit… The rude people smacking him couldn’t be mad over a short nap... Then he’d wake up and…

“You have to— —st Off!”

“Blasters—”

Somebody grabbed a handful of sensitive wires in their claws and _yanked_. It was electrifying. Bright lights strobed in his processor. Unable to speak, Blast Off flailed. A ripple of movement cascaded as plating unlatched and tried to move.

“Come on—come on—”

“Transf—”

Words punctured through the haze. Screamed through it, really.

“—ansform!” And only Brawl could be that obnoxiously loud, louder than Onslaught, Vortex, and Swindle all together when he wanted to be. “YOU’RE TOO BIG. YOU NEED TO TRANSFORM, BLAST OFF. **YOU HAVE TO.** ”

If his audials weren’t busted before, Blast Off was sure Brawl bellowing at the top of his vocalizer had broken them.

“TRANSFORM!”

Faced with a choice between Brawl continuing to yell or doing what he was saying was important to do so he’d pipe down, Blast Off unhappily picked obeying and spun his T-cog. Haltingly. Painfully. Somehow, he forced himself (or what parts were still attached to him), stopping twice midway to catch his vents, to mass shift and switch into root mode.

Snowflakes melted on his back. Mechs crowded above him. Blurs of color.

Everything became mercifully blank for a while.

**/ / / /**

But he had to come bobbing back up eventually. Light. He squinted. His name? Equipment beeping. Somebody was talking. Or calling his name.

Blast Off struggled towards consciousness.

The light grew from dots to encompass a sterile room. His visor activated. He was on a medical slab. The equipment around him was beeping. Tubes snaked into his midsection and his neck. A chair’s legs scraped across the tiles as the mech who’d been sitting in it moved. A masked face blocked the view of part of the ceiling.

_Onslaught!_

Onslaught was leaning over him. His field was steady and reassuring. He put a hand on Blast Off’s chest.

“It’s good to see you awake,” Onslaught told him. “The medic only agreed to let you come back up rather than keep you sedated because I _insisted_. I preferred to tell you the news myself.”

Blast Off tilted his helm towards him, resetting his visor.

“Everybody survived the crash, thanks to your quick thinking. We won the battle. We’re being transferred to the Earth campaign,” Onslaught said. “There’s talk that Megatron’s gearing up for an escalation soon, a purge on an unheard of scale. Our transfer doesn’t leave room for much prep time. I’m sorry you wouldn’t be coming with us, Blast Off, but the medic tells me your injuries are too extensive.” He patted his chest. “Stay here, where it’s _safe_. Far from the front. It’ll be a good place for you to recover in. Understand? Don’t rush it.”

Blast Off reset his visor twice.

His commander seemed to take this as signalling a non-verbal _yes sir, I’ll stay put_.

Onslaught’s electromagnetics shifted from reassuring to rueful. “Once the campaign is over, we’ll catch up.”

Then he was standing up, his field withdrawing, and walking out of the medbay.

 _Don’t go_ , Blast Off tried to say to Onslaught’s back, tried to beg. _Don’t leave me_. But his mouth was too damaged to cooperate and all that emerged was static, too soft to be heard. There was a war to fight, and who was Blast Off to wish Onslaught would take more than the extra time Onslaught already had spent to look away from the war, stay by his side and promise him everything would be okay?

The medic came in, adjusted and twiddled some dials on the equipment and took back the chair. He didn’t want to see the medic. The chair scraped across the tiles. The medic babbled on.

Blast Off listened tiredly.

And then the medic left without sedating him.

Or the sedation patch was taking its time kicking in. He couldn’t tell.

With Onslaught gone and none of his other teammates around, Blast Off’s motivation to remain awake dimmed. He crawled back inside his own helm and shut everything out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m looking forward to being done with the events from Phase 1 soon. Notes on this chapter can be found on my dreamwidth [account](https://trajectorion.dreamwidth.org/3540.html).


	7. let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: we jumped from Furman’s transphobic and bad writing to Costa’s bad writing. I tried to cut the worst scenes. What scenes I couldn’t cut, I altered for this fic. This is because I don't think Costa hired a sensitivity reader for anything he wrote about different countries.

Onslaught set off his distress beacon, once every three rotations of this organic-infested slagheap, always at the same time and, from what Swindle can tell from triangulating the origins and coordinates of the signal after he’d received it, at the same place. Probably where the humans parked him in his alt mode for the night. He was a patient mech, Ons. Kept at it. Didn’t matter that he wasn’t getting a response—hmm. No, Swindle told a lie. Swindle was sure Onslaught was silently and screamingly fuming his spark out for each hour his minions failed to respond to his summons and every moment of forced obedience to the fleshlings was going to get taken out on _somebody_.

Onslaught in a sulk was poor company.

There were no signals from Vortex and Brawl’s distress beacons. Which was fine. It meant they hadn’t been captured. Since there was a risk the Autobots were cooperating with native authorities and monitoring the frequencies, Swindle wasn’t anticipating comms from them either. If the Autobots had caught them, they would have turned the pair over to the humans. So Vortex and Brawl must be laying low after the Decepticon invasion force had scattered across the globe.

(Imagine. Brawl had been better at staying out of the humans’ grasp than Onslaught, their resident military genius, as Onslaught was so fond of reminding them that he was! 

Swindle couldn’t wait to see the scowl in Onslaught’s visor when he pointed that out to him.)

It wasn’t hard to pinpoint the location—Onslaught had scanned a military vehicle for his alt mode upon the Combaticons’ arrival to Earth three years ago, so the humans couldn’t exactly just park him wherever they pleased like a Stunticon or shove him in a construction yard for the night like a Constructicon. They’d stick him on a military base, and lo and behold, there were only so many military bases in proximity to where Onslaught’s signal was broadcasting from. Hit the net, comb through the noise of this young species’ radio signals. (Slow as a rock sinking into tar, their transmission time.) Narrow them down, did the humans seriously call what they had for network protection security? Total joke, for somebody on Swindle’s caliber. 

He set up his holoform, electronically changed its outer cloth coverings to match the uniform the soldiers on the base wore, showed a fake ID and a disarming smile to the fleshling on guard duty at night. It was nothing, Swindle was fluent in the tricks to blending with the crowd, making it look like he was a part of it, like he belonged in it. He was in. 

Holoform in the front seat and its foot pretending to hold down the gas pedal, Swindle drove past a trio of soldiers in flak jackets and camo, a water tower, an administrative building, two rows of barracks, a canteen. Vehicles. There were two civilian vans and three police cruisers parked outside a barracks, from the nearby town. This base didn’t have the size to rate an airfield. No planes, only one helicopter landing pad.

Lines and lines of vehicles. Military transports.

Tank, tank, armored anti-personnel cars, jeep, another tank, armored anti-personnel car, two trucks, armored personnel carrier, and _aha_! There. An anti-aircraft missile trailer truck at the end of the line of vehicles next to the warehouse. Bingo.

Swindle swerved. His holoform vanished. He flipped out of jeep mode and strolled over to it.

There was a wheel lock clamped around one of the thick tires. That was almost cute. Like Swindle hadn’t been cracking wheel locks like that between rounds of small-time shoplifting and petty thievery within three months of his activation. Swindle got rid of it. He popped the hood and sure enough, there was the familiar glow of Cybertronian technology packed under the shell configured to mimic human-built vehicle parts. Swindle’s clever fingers buried themselves into the tubing and wires—first, the disabled comm systems. 

Static blared across the commlink when the systems came back online. 

It resolved into words.

< _—i-indle!_ >

< _’Sup, boss._ > Swindle rapped his knuckles on the top of Onslaught’s engine. Parts clicked fitfully inside it, indicating Onslaught had tried to rev it in aggravation and couldn’t; physical control of his frame was still denied to Onslaught. The truck sat unmoving. The absence of animated cues, of the twitches of frame language that distinguished mech from drone, was as creepy to see up close as it had been the first time Swindle had found a Decepticon the humans had trapped in their alt mode. < _I got wind of your signal. Couldn’t resist the urge to drop by. Checked out the just_ stunning _premises. How’s life with the humans been treating you?_ >

Onslaught’s words were delivered flatly.

< _If I had the ability to act on my opinion of the vermin populating this pathetic excuse for a base, there wouldn’t be a living human left within a ten mile radius._ >

< _A sentiment shared by many who experienced the local hospitality._ > Upon reflection, he’d save the ribbing about Brawl for himself. Crumbs and wrinkled cheeseburger wrappers littered Onslaught’s dashboard from the soldier who had been behind his wheel last, and before Swindle had opened up the hood, a guttering light from the warehouse had reflected, dull and dirty yellow, on a busted headlight and a series of dents were scattered across Onslaught’s dirty front grill and bumper like a past driver had been too careless and ran Onslaught headlong into a wall, humiliation upon humiliation. (Or perhaps, the driver hadn’t been careless at all. Cybertronians weren’t the only species on the planet with revenge fresh on their minds.) Better to not affront Onslaught’s damaged pride any further. Boss-mech preferred lectures or punishment details as his first choice when it came to disciplinary measures. That didn’t mean Onslaught wouldn’t administer a physical reprimand should he be given sufficient cause for it. < _But this isn’t the time nor the place. It’d be fun sport, I don’t disagree, but massacring this base will attract too much attention. And it’ll send a bad message to the Autobot I’ve suckered into helping me if he found out. I can’t have that._ >

< _An Autobot?_ > came the sharp question. < _Give me a status report. How many allies do you have? I’d like specifics. Names, if you would._ >

Swindle removed the tools from his subspace and bent over, prodding at machine parts to get at the mode-lock without breaking anything important. A rush job, but it would restore Onslaught’s ability to drive out of the base under his own power. < _Octane, Scrapper, one of the Reflector components,_ no _idea which one, Motormaster, Wildrider, Thundercracker, and Drag Strip._ > Swindle winked, hinting at conspiracy. < _Hot Rod. And the Autobot posse Hot Rod managed to rustle up for me._ >

< _That dolt with the flame decals?_ >

< _The very same,_ > Swindle purred. < _It’s a pleasure to work on idiots who want to be heroes. Especially Autobot ones. They trust so easily, it’s almost criminal. Rolled up, fired shots to get his attention, fed him some lines about there not being sides anymore, war’s over, ol’ Megs ain’t here to crack the whip over our heads, we’re all in this together now and we should toss our hats in the ring and cooperate to get off Earth together. If we had a bag of confetti, I’d have tossed it around._ >

< _Sparkwarming. And am I wrong that once you had him eating out of your hand, you pitched freeing Decepticons from situations like mine to him as rescue missions rather than a way to grab a numerical advantage?_ >

Swindle smirked. < _I knew you’d catch on fast, boss!_ >

< _... Good job._ >

< _What can I say? I’m the best at what I do._ > Swindle stowed the tools away. His hand closed around the mode-lock. He yanked it out and Onslaught rocked back on his wheels at the unpleasant surge of electricity released. < _Don’t transform. Stay in your alt, pretend your holoform is driving you and we can waltz off before anybody stops us. It’s what we did with Motormaster and Dead End when we freed them._ >

In the truck’s driver seat, a holoform blipped into existence. 

< _Who’s the lookout for you tonight?_ >

Swindle backflipped into alt mode. His holoform seated itself behind the steering wheel, fingers tapping on the rim. < _Dead End. Octane’s too flaky for my tastes and Scrapper’s tied up overseeing our new construction project. Ask me what it is once we’re on the road. We’re going after Mixmaster and Hook next. I finally badgered Hot Rod into agreeing we could use more builders who know one fragging end of a hammer from the other._ > Speaking of which. He switched channels. < _Swindle to Dead End. Is the coast clear?_ >

< _As much as it can be. No signs of activity or that your ruse with the guard was discovered, anyway. I doubt that will last if you stay too long_ ,> was Dead End’s reply. 

Swindle imagined Dead End would have told them the jig was up and the two Combaticons were about to spend the rest of their lives mode-locked and carpooling the fleshlings’ drooling spawn back and forth to their educational facilities in the same gloomy tone.

Onslaught’s holoform gingerly picked cheeseburger wrappings off his dash and tossed them out his cab’s side window. His field twanged with thinly veiled contempt. 

< _Let’s get out of here._ >

The two mechs slipped away from the military base and into the desert without being hindered.

Swindle counted the debt he owed Onslaught for Zeta paid.

Mountains crouched as faint red bulges on the horizon. Onslaught’s injuries slowed him, but true to form, he was stoic. Coasting down the road, Dead End zooming behind them, Swindle brought Onslaught up to date on what had transpired while Onslaught was out of the loop, starting from when Thundercracker’s ragtag group had come in from New York and bumped around with their thumbs up their afts before Swindle had honed in on them and ending with him and Hot Rod’s efforts to locate, release and recruit as many Cybertronians as they could without their fragile ‘truce’ imploding or kicking up new arguments over how much passenger room they could build the starship to have while keeping it spaceworthy. 

It was a shaky alliance held together by Hot Rod’s charisma, Swindle’s fast-talking, and a lack of superior alternatives. 

They came to the top of one of the ridges overlooking the starship construction site. Swindle and Onslaught pulled to a halt and reverted to root modes. Sparing them only a brief blare of his horn, Dead End bypassed them and sped down the ridge. 

His wheels crunched over dry shrubbery poking out of the rocks.

Drag Strip’s polished armor glinted in the moonlight. At the edge of the site, the yellow Stunticon cupped his hands over his mouth and called out to his approaching teammate. The other Stunticon drove a lazy circle around him, churning up clouds of dust, and left skid marks in the dirt before transforming. Dead End followed Drag Strip to where the lone Reflector component and Mirage were facing off. Bluestreak was standing behind Mirage, arms folded and doors raised high. The current subject of contention: unknown. On the ground, accumulated metal materials and iron bars were piled up. Scrapper had marked the area for the outlying structure with small flags. They fluttered in the breeze. 

Scaffolding had been raised. Not much else was moving down there, save for the mecha. 

“I haven’t told Thundercracker and the others what I’m planning yet, just Scrapper and Motormaster. And you,” said Swindle.

Circumstances had forced his hand in telling Scrapper. The Constructicon leader had been dead-set on killing Omega Supreme in revenge for Devastator’s defeat during the Autobot counterattack against the invasion. 

(Swindle didn’t care about Scrapper’s revenge. Swindle had wanted Omega Supreme’s parts to put on the black market. Not like anything short of a blaster pressed to Prime’s helm would convince Omega Supreme to give them a ride. And an interstellar voyage where the ship was sentient and _hated_ you? Blast Off had regaled Swindle with the wide range of methods with which transport-class mechs could make life unpleasant for a disliked passenger. Like jettisoning them into the gravitational pull of the closest star.) 

They’d staked out the ancient mech and waited. That had placed them in a position to spy on Hot Rod’s group coming to talk to Omega Supreme. 

In the heat of the moment Scrapper had gone along with Swindle’s improvised plan to hoodwink Hot Rod and his group, but the instant he’d gotten Swindle alone, Scrapper had pounced and demanded the full details of how Swindle planned to seize by force the ship they had commissioned him to design. Six Decepticons against seven Autobots was not a guarantee of victory—even if the Autobots hadn’t called in reinforcements so far and even if Omega Supreme continued to choose to hide in his cave and not help his own faction—unless the Decepticons poisoned the Autobots’ fuel once they had no more need for their labor. 

It had taken a barrage of sweet-talking to convince Scrapper to shelve his dreams of gouging out Omega Supreme’s spark chamber and feeding it into Mixmaster’s drum to be melted down.

With their numbers due to rise to twelve or thirteen Decepticons versus seven Autobots, the odds were better. But _better_ wasn’t good enough. Swindle didn’t like to gamble on ‘better’ odds. He liked his dice well-weighed and his odds rigged so the outcome was that he won and came out on top in every roll. Playing by the rulebook was for people who didn’t see the merits in cheating.

That was why Swindle had brought Motormaster in on his scheme. 

He needed Motormaster’s cooperation because if he hadn’t talked Motormaster around, the notoriously belligerent truck would have responded to Swindle mounting an attempt to physically reformat him by ripping the wrench out of his hands and smashing Swindle’s face in with it. 

(Swindle elected to not inform Motormaster that he might have the know-how to perform the reformatting process, in theory, gleaned from studying the combiner units the Combaticons had stolen from the Autobots and backed up by pumping Scrapper for additional information on what Shockwave had done when modifying the Constructicons, but he had never tried to build a functional combiner himself before. Don’t give a customer cause to think that you might be selling them on a faulty product. That would be a poor business strategy.)

And if Motormaster stayed onboard, Motormaster would see to it that the other Stunticons fell in line. 

Once they had all the Stunticons retrieved anyway. Breakdown was still missing. 

Onslaught scraped dirt off where it had collected on his dented helm. He said, “The less people in the know, the less risk there is of somebody spilling the bolts before the ship’s finished. I won’t bring it up where the others can hear for now.” 

Swindle vented out in relief. One less ball to juggle.

The sun rose and morning dawned with a quarrel between Drag Strip and Red Alert. 

Red Alert had caught Drag Strip helping himself to an extra fuel ration when nobody was paying attention. Groggy from an unfinished recharge cycle, Hot Rod broke the fight up and the Autobots calmed down Red Alert before he blew a circuit and graduated to a full-blown fit. Mirage put his hand on Red Alert’s shoulder, muttering stiff reassurances between shooting glares in Drag Strip’s direction, and promising to keep an improved watch on the supplies. Drag Strip flipped Mirage off, gulped down his stolen ration, and escaped Motormaster via fleeing up one of the taller rock formations. Dead End took one look at the morning’s mess and rolled over and went back to recharging.

Scrapper and Hot Rod drove away to track down Hook and Mixmaster. At the site, everybody kept their blasters close at hand and watched the construction efforts proceed. Anxious, twitchy mechs weren’t inclined to be complacent ones. 

Swindle made his rounds. Mirage was on edge. Thwarted from punching Drag Strip, Motormaster was grouchy. Dead End stirred back into wakefulness when his tanks started gurgling in a cry for substance and Motormaster cuffed him on the audial and stuffed Dead End’s ration into the racer’s hand. Red Alert was refusing to drink any fuel he didn’t see a Decepticon sip from first. Thundercracker was distant. Sandstorm smiled kindly and spoke animatedly, but the smile didn’t touch his brilliant blue optics. Those optics watched Prowl and Swindle and Onslaught with a hard edge to their glow. 

Swindle pegged Sandstorm for a fellow actor playing it sweet. He wagered Sandstorm didn’t care for the company the helicopter was forced to surround himself with in order to get off Earth—big deal. Sandstorm could find Swindle as suspicious as the day was long, and so long as he banked that dislike down to mere talk and not action, it didn’t matter. 

(Swindle failed to question why, if that was the case, Sandstorm looked as coolly at his fellow Autobots as he did Decepticons.) 

Bluestreak and Octane sat on boulders on the side and riveted metal sheets together. 

Unlike the others, they had started in uneasy silence, peppered with requests to pass this tool or to hand over that bent piece of metal, and then moved past the strained atmosphere as they became accustomed to the menial work’s rhythm and struck up a conversation, swapping deliberately unimportant stories from the war. Octane’s stories were littered with references to how disappointed he was that there was nobody on this strange planet that had a stock of decent engex they would share and therefore there was no means for him to get smashed. A tragedy. 

Bluestreak sympathetized. The Autobot had a mouth like a motor if you got him going without interruptions. His doors fluttered energetically. Wildrider, regulated to unwinding coils of black cabling and hauling support beams alongside Prowl and the Reflector component, offered colorful side commentary to Octane’s stories. 

Thundercracker went for a flight midmorning. He didn’t tell them his destination. 

Onslaught stayed for a day and a half. 

A comm and a set of coordinates from him pinged Swindle in the afternoon. 

< _Swindle. A word._ >

< _Coming, coming!_ >

The coordinates were a match to a location away from the rest of the group, cast in the cool shade of a cliff. Onslaught was avoiding eavesdroppers. Experience told Swindle it was best if he stayed on top of Onslaught’s next move rather than risk being blindsided by it. He drove to the base of the cliff. Stance set in a parade rest, Onslaught was waiting. “You hardly need additional assistance in keeping the Autobots in the dark,” Onslaught said. “I’m going to go fetch my other subordinates so we can make it back in time for the launch.”

Swindle clapped his hands together, inadvertently resetting his visor. “You already know where they are?”

“Vortex’s unit was deployed to Alaska. Brawl was assigned near China. They can’t have strayed too far. And if they have, I know how they think. Where they’d go.” The bottom edge of Onslaught’s visor twitched. He rubbed his forehead and gave the impression of grimacing. “Blast Off was assigned to the same unit as Brawl, wasn’t he? Blast Off has the common sense to stop Brawl from wandering too far.”

Swindle’s optical ridges catapulted up. 

“Uh.” 

Swindle now had cause to wonder if the humans had driven Onslaught harder into a hard surface than he’d initially assumed. (Maybe he ought to delay Onslaught’s departure until Hook was freed from the humans and the medic had a chance to look at him?)

Swindle’s questioning noise squeezed a sigh from Onslaught. 

“What?”

Optics darting away from Onslaught’s dented frame, Swindle awkwardly pointed out: “Blast Off wasn’t with a unit. He isn’t on Earth.” Otherwise Swindle would have just stolen the energon needed for Blast Off to break orbit and have him fly them away from Earth instead of investing in scamming the Autobots.

Onslaught reset his visor. “Ah.” And because he was Onslaught and therefore a compulsive control freak who didn’t enjoy verbally admitting to his mistakes, even minor ones, he glossed over the lapse. “Then I have only two of my subordinates to locate, not three. I’ve checked the schedule Scrapper has for the ship’s completion. I’ll collect them and rendezvous with you back at the launch site one day before the departure date.”

Swindle pulled the schedule up in his HUD. Swindle did the math. He nodded and decided to not make a fuss about his commander delaying his trip and going to see a medic. It wasn’t a big deal. Onslaught was probably merely recovering from his ordeal. “I can work with that,” Swindle said, “We’ll have the passenger room for two more Decepticons, since we’re not bringing the Autobots with us.”

(And taking Vortex and Brawl along now saved him from Onslaught insisting they make a return trip to Earth to pick them up later.)

**/ / / /**

A superficial breakage in the top of his windshield and a dent crumpling the front of his hood doing nothing to dampen his high spirits, Wildrider danced in place. He crowed, “We did it! We didn’t get to step on the meatbag who was operating him! Wish we had! But we got Breakdown back!”

“Stupid organic shot me in a tire. I coulda’ killed it for that,” Drag Strip complained, nursing the half-deflated tire on his shoulder.

“Woe is you, Drag Strip,” Dead End said. “Can anybody else comprehend the depths of suffering you must be in, at having your flawless frame besmirched by an organic because you were too slow to dodge it shooting at you?”

“Who asked you, huh? Frag off. And _who_ are you calling slow! I’m not slow. I’m the fastest mech in the universe. Blurr has nothing on me. Blurr _wishes_ he was me.”

“You,” Wildrider interjected. “He’s calling you slow. You should punch him.”

“ _You’re_ stupid. Maybe I’ll punch him, then I’ll punch _you._ ”

“Not if I punch you first.”

“Frag you. Get fragged.”

“Hahah, dumbaft!”

“Just have Hook replace your tire after he’s done piecing Breakdown back together,” Dead End dolefully weighed in. “You’ll be delaying the inevitable, since you’ll doubtlessly bust it again in the future, but sooner or later every part of our frames will break and corrode away and that hasn’t stopped you from performing basic maintenance before.”

“For the love of fragging Primus, you three will be delaying the _inevitable_ can of aftkicking I have in store for you if you cut the goddamn scrap and _quit yapping_ within the next five seconds,” Motormaster’s voice boomed from his alt mode.

Wildrider performed a highly rude hand gesture in Motormaster’s direction. 

Drag Strip snickered. 

Dead End clicked in his intake and boredly inspected his fingertips.

Mixmaster and Swindle stood to the side. Hook rolled Breakdown out of Motormaster’s trailer backwards, spoilers first. The Stunticons had removed the mode-lock from Breakdown. The racer was still in poor condition. Pit, he looked even worse than Onslaught had looked. A window was shattered, a glittering web of jagged glass shards spread out and sparkling in Breakdown’s plush driver seat. One of his side mirrors had come loose and drooped towards the ground, connected to his frame only by a bundle of naked wires.

“Stop looking at me. Please. It makes me uncomfortable. I feel awful,” Breakdown groaned, headlights dimmed.

“If _I_ was T-boned by one of you imbecile Stunticons, I’d call feeling _awful_ a normal symptom,” sniffed Hook, uncoiling his medical cable from its housing and loftily ignoring his patient’s squirming at the examination to plug in. The same side with the shattered window had the doors crumpled inward from the force of a collusion and bore traces of yellow paint. Breakdown’s left tail lights were broken. And his roof was missing. “Swindle, his T-cog is functional. Mixmaster, I need more materials. Go collect them from Scrapper. If the Autobots are suspicious about you coming and going, don’t do anything to make it worse.”

“I’m on it.” Mixmaster scooped up the stack of outer insulation panels he was supposed to be transporting and left.

Unfolding up into root mode, Motormaster stood tall. Motormaster and his gang wasn’t Swindle’s first choice for putting on a display of brute force, but the Combaticons weren’t around and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

And Swindle hardly intended to use himself as part of a product’s test run. Swindle was cleverer than that. He’d cranked out the modifications as fast as he could under the time limit of finishing the combiner before the launch date. No, playing the role of test dummies was for _other_ people. They troubleshooted, they took the fall, Swindle profited. A policy that worked well on Earth. Swindle didn’t intend to change it.

Electromagnetics buoyant with triumph, Swindle licked his lips. “Mechs, everything’s in place. We’re getting this show on the road here and now. I think Rodimus deserves a big sparkfelt _thank-you_ present from us Decepticons for lending a hand, what’cha say?”

**/ / / /**

Weeks after Onslaught’s departure, Optimus Prime’s alt mode dropped right onto Swindle’s helm like—

Well. Like a large truck tended to do when placed onto an airplane and then dropped from said airplane at a great height onto an unsuspecting and stationary target who, as many people indulging in a splurt of self-congratulatory gloating after hooking up multiple smaller mechs into one giant mech to kill their enemies with so often forgot to, neglected to look up. 

**THA- _CLANG!_**

Swindle’s face slammed into the dirt. 

Parts _crunched_ , springs and gears popping out of place. Deeming him incapacitated for now, Optimus rolled off Swindle, up onto his feet, and charged the newly combined Menasor.

Menasor howled. 

And nearby, the Autobots and the Decepticons resumed a traditional and popular cross-faction activity: seeing who could rack up the most violence inflicted upon a member of the opposing faction in a battle. Mixmaster targeted Hot Rod. Bluestreak fought Hook. Octane ducked Red Alert’s attempt to shoot him. Scrapper grappled with Bumblebee and gained the advantage, his hands wrapped around Bumblebee’s neck and Bumblebee’s legs dangling off the ground.

“Everyone wants to focus on the big guy. Just because we have a _new_ combiner,” Scrapper groused, smashing Bumblebee’s helm into the ground. Dirt clods flew. Metal shrieked, bolts shearing apart under the pressure. Scrapper pulled back his fist, preparing to manually rearrange Bumblebee’s face into a portrait of ruined paint and splintered denta. “But you shouldn’t count out the Constructicons!”

Thundercracker’s laser shot zapped Scrapper in the chassis. The fully charged blast knocked him off Bumblebee, Scrapper reeling backwards to collapse in a smoking heap.

“I never liked those guys,” Thundercracker commented blithely. 

He lowered his gun. 

Smoke wafted away from the tip.

Bumblebee wheezed. “What are you… ?”

“Swindle is a Combaticon,” Thundercracker reminded him, as if it should be obvious and as if that explained the events unfolding. You could nevertrust a Combaticon to be loyal to anything but themselves and their own interests. “He’s also a liar.” As Hot Rod was finding out. “He’s going to keep fighting no matter what.” 

Because what use was a Combaticon if the fighting was over?

Somewhere else on the launch site, Swindle hauled himself out on his hands and knees from the crater getting Optimus Prime in alt mode dropped on his helm had left. He emitted a squawking protest as one of Menasor’s massive hands fastened onto and ripped out a chunk of the starship they’d spent the last several weeks building, and advanced on the Prime with their makeshift weapon.

Menasor attacked the Autobots. 

And Menasor lost. 

Sensibly, Swindle didn’t stick around. He hightailed it.

**/ / / /**

If Vortex hadn’t radioed his comms, Swindle would have pulled off the highway and hidden from the distant sound of a helicopter flying overhead until it passed him by, in case it was operated by humans. But Vortex had so Swindle kept driving on the deserted highway and Onslaught and Brawl intercepted the jeep just outside of the state border. Transforming as he went, Vortex cut through the air and touched down next to Onslaught. He’d risked the commlink so Swindle would cotton onto the locations of the other Combaticons. 

Brawl stomped his foot. “What happened? Onslaught said ya’ had a ship ready to go, but you’re on the run and there’s no ship!”

Swindle twiddled his fingers and whistled airily. “Okaaaay. You know that saying, don’t put all your energon cubes in one storage crate? ‘Cuz sometimes a few explode? Not every start-up enterprise makes it off the ground. Stockholders get cold feet! Primes and humans in battle armor drop in uninvited!”

Onslaught took in Swindle’s sorry state. 

“Your scheme went wrong.” Onslaught didn’t phrase it as a question.

Swindle stopped whistling. His optics flared. 

“Ultra Magnus was another guest who invited himself. Big Blue wasn’t as gullible as Hot Rod. He brought reinforcements. Optimus Prime got off his aft just in time to _screw up_ my _fragging_ combiner and then _Thundercracker_ turned on us. I _barely_ got away before the humans came on the scene and started hauling away the losers.”

“Back to being imprisoned and mode-locked,” Onslaught said.

“Duh. The humans don’t know how to build prisons that will hold us otherwise, so they have to shut us down.”

“Thundercracker’s a traitor?” Brawl hooted.

“Guess ol’ Screamer rubbed off on him,” Vortex said.

Brawl persisted. “We’re talking about the same jet? Blue, an outlier, _Thundercracker_? Since when did that flying rust bucket not do what he was told?”

Swindle ground his denta and revved his engine, still smarting from how close he had been to getting away with it and escaping from Earth into the wider galaxy before the Autobots ruined the scheme.

“The traitor couldn’t teleport so he _sure_ wasn’t Skywarp, unless Skywarp painted himself blue when I wasn’t looking. Who cares about Thundercracker now? The humans know I ran. They’ve got the backing of this country’s government. They’ll be on high alert, attempting to track me. I’ll tell you later. We need to scram!” Swindle said. 

And to his credit, Onslaught didn’t waste time. Onslaught only favored Swindle with a long, calculating stare that sent a chill down Swindle’s spinal strut before switching into action.

“Change of plans, since the previous one is no longer feasible. We have limited mechpower. We shouldn’t spend our resources on extraneous missions. Show of hands, I presume nobody here is interested in joining our fellow Cybertronians in their current predicament?”

Three sets of hands went up.

“Naw.”

“No thanks.”

“Nope.”

“Let’s get out of the country and decrease the risk then.”

**/ / / /**

Swindle woke up in the middle of the night. 

It wasn’t the sounds Brawl made during recharge that woke him up. Like the other Combaticons, Swindle possessed millenia of practice at sleeping through _that._ He had powered down into recharge squashed between Onslaught and Brawl, back leaning up against the wall for support. It was cold in the northern reaches of this planet’s hemisphere and none of them had the upgrades for snowy weather. Shared proximity was a cheap means to generate heat and shave off the pains of frozen-up joints at no cost. 

Brawl was still there on his left, a green mountain of plating and a heavy arm draped over Swindle, but there was an empty spot where Onslaught had been recharging on his right.

An empty spot still warm and evidently recently vacated. 

Still partly-asleep, Swindle squinted at it, willing his processor to chug into gear. He rubbed his optics, knuckling his fist into the lenses. Wiggling a little, he leaned around the visual barrier presented by Brawl’s wide chest and—Yeah. There was Vortex, on the other side of Brawl, rotors folded together and curled up against the tank in order to get close to the heat put out by his engine. Moisture collected in droplets on Vortex’s plating from where snowflakes had melted. It must be Onslaught’s turn on tonight’s watch duty. He had to have switched out with Vortex, who had been the one on watch when Swindle had dozed off. 

Squirming out from under Brawl’s arm, careful not to wake him, Swindle crept over to the archway that had once had a door. 

His ventilations hung in the air in front of him as mist.

The Combaticons had holed up in one of the derelict buildings in the cluster of ruins they had found buried in the thick snowbanks. The humans that must have built and then abandoned the site had been absent for a sufficient period of time that trees were growing in the spaces between the buildings where roadways had once been. Windows lined up in rows of miniature square holes in the gray, washed out cement. Barbed wire coils peeked out from under white blankets. The surrounding forest was reduced to a wall of spindly black needles in the darkness, encircling the ruins and stabbing into the sky.

With his back to the archway, Onslaught was seated outside on a piece of rubble in the snow. Twisted metal bars protruded from the side of the cement chunk and a trail trampled by Vortex and Onslaught’s feet sinking deep into the snow connected it to the archway. 

From the angle of his helm, Onslaught was staring up at the stars. 

It was clear above. Clouds were only just starting to gather. 

Was he looking for Cybertron, up there? 

It wasn’t like Onslaught to be nostalgic for the wasteland that had been the homeworld. None of the Combaticons had visited Cybertron for centuries. (Except for Blast Off. And Blast Off’s lone visit had been short.)

“You’re up late,” said Onslaught, without turning his helm to look at Swindle. His gun rested in his lap.

“I felt like stretching my legs. No movement around here?”

“None.”

Swindle considered going back to recharge. But he didn’t feel particularly drowsy anymore. His empty fuel tanks pinched. He wanted a distraction. Onslaught was available to provide it.

“I ain’t got the pieces for Fullstasis, but if you push over and make room so I don’t have to sit in the snow, I got a card deck on me.”

“Hunting for entertainment?”

“Can you blame me? The human network’s coverage is awful out here.” Swindle pitched his voice into a whine. “I’m _bored_.”

“Swindle, I cannot express how miniscule of a slag I give about your boredom.”

Despite his words, Onslaught indulged him and moved over on the piece of rubble. Swindle sat down and unsubspaced the cards. He shuffled them. They didn’t say much after that.

Snow began to fall eventually.

**/ / / /**

Blast Off had gone back to Cybertron after it had been abandoned, back when Banzaitron was alive.

According to him, unless one was itching to look at miles and miles of smog-covered radioactive slag, there was nothing to see on Cybertron. Blast Off had flown there because of bad timing and a hash of internal politics. The shuttle been temporarily assigned by Banzaitron’s command as a member of the intelligence division to Razorclaw’s warship, to investigate a crew member whose loyalties Razorclaw had expressed doubts about and see if it was necessary to call in the DJD from the DJD’s busy day job of polishing Megatron’s aft to make an example of him. 

And then Bludgeon had himself a merry time and woke up _Thunderwing_. 

It was screwball stuff like that which made Swindle decide _fried beyond functionality_ was the default status of Bludgeon’s circuitry.

Razorclaw’s crew had been directed by Megatron to focus their efforts in putting Thunderwing down for good. Torching Thunderwing from orbit into melted slag and Cybertron with him had been a solution Razorclaw was authorized to resort to. Razorclaw had dispatched assault teams from his warship down to Cybertron’s surface at the last moment to cooperate with the Autobots and the Wreckers and fight. One assault team had included Blast Off, hidden amidst the fliers diving downward to open fire on Thunderwing. 

In the aftermath, Blast Off had vented to Vortex within Swindle’s hearing range about every little problem that had cropped for him during the mission. Blast Off hadn’t uncovered a _hint_ of proof that this Carnivac fellow wasn’t loyal to the Decepticons before the investigation was called off, the toxins from the bombed-out surface had made him queasy, and fighting Thunderwing had been an exercise in facing a colossus that treated you like a bug stinging it. 

Blast Off had written the incident off as a waste of his time. 

He wasn’t the only one left disgruntled by the incident. Onslaught had been disgruntled too. 

Swindle wasn’t privy to the _specifics_ of what the two officers had disagreed over, but the reason Blast Off had been singled out for the mission was because Banzaitron and Onslaught had been having an argument. Such power struggles were commonplace in the Decepticons. 

Banzaitron had won the argument and delivered a snippy reminder to Onslaught about which one of them was in charge of the division and to not overstep himself by borrowing one of his elite team without consulting Onslaught and assigning them to serve on another commander’s warship. And to make the slight clear, the mission Blast Off had been sent away on was an insultingly trivial one.

Onslaught hadn’t been happy about it.

Handed the role of a bystander on the sidelines along with Swindle, Brawl hadn’t understood why Onslaught had been cranky at Blast Off’s assignment to Razorclaw’s warship. Swindle had picked up on why, _easy_. Boss hadn’t liked his favorite subordinate being removed without his permission from his chain of command. Even temporarily. 

And Swindle knew Onslaught wouldn’t _admit_ to having a favorite, but let’s be real. Besides himself, who was Onslaught kidding?

Swindle didn’t believe much in abstracts. High-minded concepts—religion, virtue, pretty ideals? Hah! Slop peddled to the masses to get them to follow the rules. Swindle was a mech who put a great (others might argue excessive) deal of stock in the _material_. 

He believed in concrete things, in printed out contracts and paychecks. Stuff you could calculate and hoard and put a price tag on. Standing on their own, words meant nothing. A mech could talk a big game, say everything a sucker wanted to hear, and be gone before an hour was up. Actions spoke louder than words. Actions were the root of reputation and the right reputation that a customer could count on to stay steady was ultimately what kept clientele coming back after the first sale. 

So, in light of this belief, Swindle had made note of a series of actions.

When openings had come up to advance his position at Onslaught’s expanse, whether through traditional Decepticon backstabbing or through a bribe to spill some of the dirty secrets about his commanding officer Blast Off had to have learned over the millenia, Blast Off had never taken them.

For a Decepticon, Blast Off seemed strangely content to be loyal.

When an onboard Combaticon bothered Blast Off enough, he would fly low and threaten to throw the offender out his cargo hold door. And he would sometimes follow through.

Blast Off never threatened Onslaught with this, even on occasions where Swindle knew for a _fact_ that Blast Off had been angry at Onslaught.

When it had been Blast Off’s turn to dole out the energon rations during the leaner times of campaigns, every now and then Blast Off would give three portions to Vortex, Brawl, and Swindle, a portion and one-fourth to Onslaught, and three-fourths a portion to himself. Onslaught hadn’t noticed—Onslaught did a perfunctory check to see if the team rations were being handed out unevenly only if Brawl or Swindle was the one doing it. Onslaught took it as a given Blast Off was passing around the correct portions. (Swindle could call this policy unfairly biased except Onslaught had only taken it up after he’d repeatedly caught Swindle skimming off the top when it was his turn. Brawl’s excuse was an innocent one: Brawl was lazy about measuring.)

Blast Off never mentioned this aloud or brought it up to Onslaught. 

Swindle had observed and put these actions together. He found the pattern he saw totally inexplicable. Actions spoke louder than words, but what was Blast Off’s behavior saying? Like, why would Blast Off voluntarily sacrifice some of his ration if Blast Off didn’t plan on calling in the debt later? What was the trade-off? Why did he do it if he wasn’t rewarded for it? 

… Unless it was the knowledge alone of being able to give something good to Onslaught that Blast Off considered his reward.

Pieces had rapidly fallen into place after that.

Comparing stories with Vortex behind their teammates’ backs had only solidified Swindle’s hunch.

Blast Off was good at hiding his feelings. Just not perfect. 

Swindle could recognize wanting and it was plain to Swindle that Blast Off wanted their commander.

Whichever lens one interpreted it through, Blast Off’s actions spelled out ever so quietly a ridiculous amount of affection bordering on unsettling obsession, harbored close to his spark. An desire that outlasted the rise and fall of several organic civilizations in its continuity. It was really just like Onslaught, Swindle thought. To take that level of devotion from his favorite as his _due_ rather than a sign that the person showing him that much devotion was sweet on him.

**/ / / /**

For the last three years, Vortex had the Alaskan wilds to lurk in. Months after Megatron’s defeat, the humans in the region hadn’t experienced a newfound wellspring of compassion towards the invaders. Funny, how they hadn’t appreciated their coastal towns burnt to the ground and their sea ports ravaged. Two members of Vortex’s unit, Hotlink and Heavy Load, had been executed. Their frames were dumped in an abandoned mining quarry to rust. (Silly humans. They were so backwards and inferior that they couldn’t even _kill_ Cybertronians right. Heavy Load hadn’t been quite dead by the time Vortex had flown into the quarry. Vortex had corrected that.) 

Vortex had siphoned the energon out of the frames and lived off what he extracted. 

Brawl’s hiding spot hadn’t been too far from a small town. He had followed a river he didn’t know the name of out of China and into Russia and without orders to act upon, he had hunkered down there to wait. Brawl had rolled around in the murk of melted snow and dirt, caking his outer plating in twigs, turfs of vegetation, moss clumps, and dirt so he could blend in better and hide under the cover of the forest from humans. 

By the time Vortex and Onslaught had located Brawl, he’d started growing grass from the dirt on his cannon barrel. 

(On the way back to the launch site, Onslaught had ordered him to go for a swim in the first large body of water they crossed and wash off to spare them the overtly biological smells. Brawl had obliged.)

When Brawl had been hungry, he snuck up to gas stations on the edge of the small town and helped himself to a couple barrels of oil. It wasn’t hard, he informed the other Combaticons. The humans never changed where they stored them. And their barriers were trash. Brawl had crumpled them up like plastic. The oil tasted disgusting and Brawl would probably need his fuel pump cleaned out from accumulated junk. But it had meant he continued to function.

(“I. You… How,” Onslaught had rubbed his brow and asked, sporting a resigned look in his visor, “do you define _sneaking_ , Brawl?” 

To which Brawl had offered, “I covered up my brand and I didn’t say nothin’ and I went when it was dark and there was nobody around?” Swindle deduced that should they hear of a new urban legend among the humans of shaggy, grass-covered red-eyed giants that came shambling out of the forest at night and menaced innocent gas stations for their offerings of oil barrels, Brawl could safely be identified as its origin. Brawl was good at camouflage. He was better at hiding from the humans than Onslaught had been. But subtlety wasn’t Brawl’s strength.)

Gleaming icicles dangled from the top of the building’s archway. Sunlight refracted through them. Fuel piled up in a pitiful heap on the ground beside the fire pit, they had what Vortex and Brawl had contributed and what fuel Onslaught and Swindle had brought over from America.

It was clear that it wasn’t going to be enough.

Vortex was down to the dregs of the energon he had siphoned from the dead Decepticons, there was two-thirds of a barrel left of the oil Brawl had stolen from the town, and today they were sitting around the fire pit and dividing up the remains of the fuel Onslaught and Swindle had carried. 

What was left was enough to sustain a single Cybertronian for a period. It wasn’t sufficient to meet the fueling needs of four Cybertronians. Minimizing their activity levels to conserve energy would prolong it. Just not for long.

Within weeks they were going to run out.

Mask retracted, Vortex frowned at the murky liquid filling his cube. “This blows.”

“What are we gonna do, Onslaught?” Brawl jabbed at the fire with a branch. A smouldering log collapsed into the embers, smoke curling upwards. Brawl had already emptied his ration. “I don’t want to starve and go into stasis lock, but if we go raiding the human cities for oil in the open, the humans have teamed up with the Autobots. They’ll call for them to stop us.”

Vortex said, “I don’t want oil, I want energon. _Real_ energon.”

“So? Cry me a river. Tex, humans don’t know how to make energon. All they got is oil.”

“Now, now. You’re assuming things. We don’t need to stick to mere assumptions,” said Onslaught. His gaze swivelled over to land on Swindle. “After all, we happen to have an expert on humans and their technological capacities these days right here. _Don’t_ we, Swindle?”

On the other side of the fire pit, Swindle went stock-still under Onslaught’s scrutiny.

Aww. Damn. 

He had thought he’d been keeping Onslaught off his trail there. Onslaught would expect Swindle to share a portion of his Earth-won profits with the team. (Which… Swindle would, sure. Reluctantly. They were his team. He and Onslaught just disagreed on how much was a reasonable amount for him to be expected to invest.) A sparkbeat too late, Swindle’s composure recovered. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about?” Swindle stalled.

“Do I need to jog your memory?”

“Seriously! I have no clue!”

Swindle’s nonchalance didn’t fool Onslaught.

“Swindle. Do you think I’m an idiot?” Onslaught asked. “I can put two and two together. Are you under the impression I can’t make the connection between humans suddenly coming into possession of Cybertronian technology and _you_ being on the planet, in a position to profit from arms distribution? Their suppressors have to be reverse-engineered from our mode-lock tech. The same goes for those battle armors you spoke of.” 

When Onslaught put it like that... It was wildly obvious to people privy to Swindle’s history as a repeated offender to the Tyrest Accord.

“These organics were too primitive for that before our invasion. Motive. Means. Opportunity.” Onslaught’s tone was conservational. “If you haven’t been peddling weapons to them from the very beginning, I’d eat my tires.”

Seeing playing dumb wasn’t going to pan out, Swindle put up his hands. “Alright! Alrighty. You got me. I’m the culprit. I cut deals with humans under the table. I made money, plenty of it, they got shiny alien technology to poke at. I didn’t _know_ our invasion was going to go bottoms-up and we’d be stranded here while they still had the tech to use on us.” 

Onslaught gave him a look that proclaimed on one hand, he was of the opinion Swindle was blowing hot air and that nothing short of an act of Primus would have stopped Swindle’s profiteering. On the other hand, since Onslaught didn’t seem surprised, Swindle felt that he wasn’t in trouble over his failure to volunteer his human connections for exploitation without being prompted.

“How many humans?”

Vortex cut in. “My money’s on all of them. Eh, Swin?”

Emboldened by Onslaught’s mild response, Swindle brightened his optics imploringly. His processor raced.

“Heh. All the ones that had a government-sized wallet.”

“Your dealings with the vermin that live here was irrelevant to me back when we potentially had a ship to leave Earth. But the ship’s gone. It’s now relevant. Being armed does no good if we’re too depleted to fight. Do you know if your human contacts have reverse-engineered the methods to produce energon?” Onslaught asked.

Producing a holographic list of his top human customers, Swindle rattled off candidates and concealed his thoughts under an unruffled surface. A way to spin this in his favor was dawning on him. Onslaught listened, Brawl looked clueless.

“Six of those governments control territory on this landmass,” Onslaught muttered. “Along with two of the black market organizations. If we targeted one and took their leader hostage, perhaps the fleshlings would find themselves politically motivated to exchange energon in return for prolonging the leader’s life…”

Vortex wagged a finger. “If we went that route, I say go for the leader’s spawn. Remember that Urtuskian on Parthus? Fleshings are biologically coded to be attached to their offspring. Receiving their fingers in the mail is a great motivator for cooperation.”

Onslaught growled. “We can discuss the finer details of blackmailing them into serving our interests once I’ve selected a _target_ , Vortex. Planning occurs in stages. Curb your enthusiasm.”

Brawl butted in, “But why can’t we raid for energon in secret if we got this list? We’re stronger than they are. We can _take_ what we want! We grab a hostage, that means Vortex will get the fun of messing with them and I wouldn’t get to have fun at all! That’s what happened the last time! You made me sit the deal on Parthus out!”

“It wasn’t a mission that called for your skillset. Without supervision you break organics too easily,” Vortex shrugged. 

Proving he had kept up with Swindle reciting customer receipts at high speed, Onslaught rolled his optics. “We’re not going to do a raid because these humans knowing how to produce energon doesn’t mean any of them have built facilities for doing so. There’s nowhere _to_ raid yet.”

“Guys, I love the gung-ho attitude as much as the next ‘bot and I’m not against hostage-taking, but you’re missing the easy solution,” Swindle made his move. He snapped his fingers. “Why exert energy _forcing_ the humans to cooperate and give us what we want when we can make them give it to us _willingly_?”

Three red visors swung around to stare at him. 

Fluffing up his armor, Swindle tapped the holographic list.

“I get in touch with one of these humans, I find out who’s in the Earth market for the services of an unstoppable mercenary force, we talk it out, we draw up a contract. The terms? Energon in exchange for work.” 

The silence rang.

“Huh? You’re joking,” Brawl responded.

“Work for the _humans_?” Onslaught demanded, sounding appalled. Swindle hadn’t anticipated happiness from him about the proposal. Onslaught was the one who’d been trapped in his alt mode by the humans after all. “Have you lost it?”

Vortex drawled, “Aren’t you clever. What’s your next suggestion, smartaft, we transform and gift-wrap ourselves so the pests can mode-lock us without a hassle? Or maybe we should put on a festival, tell the Autobots right where we are so they can capture us?”

“I sold them the tech. Give me a day or two, I can insulate us to be immune to it,” Swindle argued. “We’ve made contracts with organics before. I can be the liaison, barter for a good deal.”

The other three Combaticons remained openly skeptical.

“Organics that had achieved the minimum of interstellar space travel. Unlike the ones on this backwater,” said Vortex. 

“We ended up on this continent because you were running away from the humans and now you wanna work for ‘em? It’ll end the same way,” Brawl reminded him.

“You expect humans to abide by a contract? Especially a contract with terms that would grant them a position to control access to the fuel we need to live?” Onslaught grabbed a branch and pitched it into the fire. Flames crawled up it. Wood turned black and cracked.

Swindle turned off the list. 

“I _expect_ them to pay well for mercenaries to kill other humans with and ditch us at the first chance. They built the facilities, we get what we need. We backstab them first, ransack the place, and we get out.”

“You’re making a far-fetched pitch and I’m seeing quite a number of pitfalls in it. Humans, Autobot interference, dependence on hostile parties for energon... I’m unconvinced,” Onslaught stated.

Vortex and Brawl nodded.

It took hours of arguing for the other Combaticons to budge an inch from how ridiculous they dubbed Swindle’s scheme. And another three hours after that until they looked at their tiny stockpile of fuel next to the firepit and begrudgingly agreed to give it a try. An additional two hours as Onslaught nitpicked at Swindle’s drafted contract before he let him hop on the network and hunt for clients.

And it came down to this: the Combaticons didn’t want to work for humans. They didn’t want to scrounge for fuel. They didn’t want to hide from Autobots rather than fight them. But the situation was dire. In a choice between temporary (if distasteful) employment as a means to an end and starvation until their systems knocked them into stasis lock and rendered them helpless, practicality won out.

Hunger had a gift for chewing through resistance. 

**/ / / /**

Later, the Combaticons would refer to this as a record low for their career and collectively agree to never speak of it again, and if mentioned by other Cybertronians, to wince and change the subject.

**/ / / /**

Clustered in a burnt stadium in one of the cities they had wrecked and with the emptied cubes of energon their employers had provided them, Vortex tilted his head and said from where he was lounging, “Listen to it _go_ , it’s like a glitchmouse. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Is that pest... telling you off, Onslaught?”

Seated on the ground, Brawl said, “It’s gotta realize we could kill it without trying, right? And it’s still getting up in your face?”

“It’s glitched then. Step on it and tell its government to get a less squeaky replacement.”

Onslaught, crouched down on one knee in order to pretend he cared about what the human leader was saying, aimed a snarl in their direction. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that sooner… Oh _right,_ because timing matters. Don’t tempt me, Vortex. I’m glad this display is _amusing_ you.” Abandoning the sarcasm and switching back to the human language, Onslaught said, “Human, we have accomplished the military objective given to us within the allotted time frame. This settlement is conquered. We aren’t drones. We require energon and rest after battle. Go enjoy the victory _our_ power secured.”

The human conferred with its group. 

Then it turned to the Combaticons and yammered again.

“Is it threatening to shortcharge us on energon?” Brawl asked.

“Ask it who it thinks it is, interrupting our refuelling break,” Vortex suggested mischievously. Due to speaking in Cybertronian, their remarks were indecipherable to the humans.

Ignoring both his obnoxious subordinates, Onslaught said, “Human, are you implying you want to renegotiate the terms of the contract about how much energon we are entitled to in exchange for our services? In the middle of your little war? That seems unwise. But regardless, we will withdraw immediately to your capital where our liaison is stationed to oversee the energon facilities. You may push the offensive onward without us.” He added with unmistakable malice. “Unless you didn’t mean to imply that. _Sir._ ”

The human froze. It glanced at the other humans. The other humans suddenly weren’t so certain of themselves.

It adjusted the piece of fabric wrapped around its neck and stammered.

“Backpedelling! So its got a brain after all!“ Vortex said. He switched to the human language, “So delighted that we understand each other perfectly, _sir._ We hate being idle and _love_ to be of service!” He grabbed an energon cube. “Once we’re done with our lunch break.”

The humans fled the area.

“I hate this. If a Cybertronian had been that disrespectful to me, I would’ve gutted them,” Vortex said, reverting to Cybertronian.

“The energon’s good, but I don’t like being ordered around by a human worm,” Brawl echoed.

“As long as they have the energon, we have to keep this up. We’ll obey them. For now,” Onslaught said, privately regretting he had let them be talked into this. He had a dully throbbing migraine and that was without the organics worsening it. “But don’t worry. Once Swindle’s swiped enough energon without them noticing and stabilized it to last us, we can quit. That’s the plan.” 

The energon production method the humans had reverse-engineered had missed a step. The partially unrefined energon’s instability made it too difficult to store. 

After the Combaticons inspected the sample they had been provided with before signing the contract and discovered this, Swindle corrected the flaw and finished the refinement process, so it would last and started stockpiling it once the government had given him access to the facilities as the Combaticon liaison. Unaware the energon could be further refined, their employers wrongly assumed they drank whatever they were given without a drop being saved.

“Oh, the plan? The plan I shouldn’t worry about, because your plans are infallible? Are you forgetting we’re going to have to put up with being shown disrespect from our employers in the meantime?”

Onslaught bit the word out, “No.”

“Are you figuring out how to stop me from ruining the plan when I _murder our employers_ the next time they try to withhold energon from me because we misbehaved?”

“Continue with this insolence, Vortex, and I’ll remove your vocalizer until you convince me you know how to use it to address a commanding officer properly,” Onslaught said. His field reflected surliness. “Look, I don’t want to do this either. I prefer it when we’re working for ourselves, not organics. But we _will_ make do.”

“Wish ‘making do’ didn’t mean us Combaticons being bossed around by stinkin’ worms,” Brawl said. 

Vortex slapped his hand on his thigh. “Not all Combaticons. Because Swindle’s probably living it up, duping the humans in the city and waxing his hood while we work our tailpipes off for the energon. He got the _easy_ part.”

“Hey! Shut it!” Brawl protested. 

“Quit letting Swindle butter you up, Brawl, you know I’m right.”

“We don’t need more than three of us to terminate humans,” Onslaught said gruffly, feeling his headache increase. “It’s in Swindle’s nature to feed his own greed. Placing him in charge of stockpiling the energon will turn his nature to our advantage.” 

“I’m calling it as I see it. Swin’s let the free reign he’s had on this mudball go to his head!”

Primus, grant him patience.

“So long as he remembers to toe the line, pulls his weight, and only skims off the top of the stockpile that there’s still enough energon for the four of us, I’m choosing to overlook that—for now.”

Put out, Brawl said, “C’mon. You guys are being too rough on Swindle.”

The Combaticons were still quarrelling when they left the stadium and walked into an Autobot ambush. The Autobots announced themselves through Smokescreen shooting Vortex in the face and Optimus Prime in alt mode running over Onslaught. Brawl swore and dove for his blaster.

**/ / / /**

A day after they had soundly defeated the Autobots’ bungled ambush, the Combaticons paused in an army hangar for a break from their busy razing of the nearest city. 

They were in the midst of refuelling and reminiscing about the shrieks Jetfire had produced as Vortex had sliced his wing off when Optimus Prime’s alt mode made a repeat appearance and crashed through the hangar wall, slammed into Vortex like a battering ram at full speed, continued down the entire length of the hanger, and kept on going, running his front cab, with Vortex still plastered to it, clean out the other wall in a whirl of ruptured metal and debris. Onslaught and Brawl ran after them to the broken wall.

“Wh—what just happened?” Brawl sputtered.

Optimus Prime hit the brakes. 

Vortex went flying and slammed into the asphalt rotors-first. Groaning, Vortex rolled over onto his front.

“Hey! Get away from him!” Brawl roared and shook his fist when he spotted Ratchet and humans in two of those dumb battle armors closing in on his teammate. Cannon barrel heating up, he charged in to protect Vortex only to be set upon himself by a joint attack from Prowl and Jazz in alt mode. Predictably, this served to increase his anger. Brawl momentarily forgot he had a blaster and started swinging. Onslaught abandoned the confines of the hangar and went into the frey after him.

< _Vortex can take care of himself. I’ll tackle Prime, you handle those two_ ,> Onslaught radioed Brawl. < _I can’t fathom why they’re launching a second attack if they aren’t going to change their strategy and exit their alt modes so they’re not easy targets, but if the Autobots want us to wipe the floor with them twice, why not oblige them?_ >

Onslaught marched straight towards Optimus Prime, a taunt ready on his tongue.

Only to discover the Autobots _had_ changed strategies and retrieved their collective common sense when Prime shifted into root mode and lunged at him with a fist raised.

And then, for some godforsaken reason, Thundercracker picked that moment to further cement his status as a traitor and showed up.

To help the Autobots.

The inconvenience of Thundercracker’s timing would be outmatched in turn by a ragtag assortment of Predacons who invited themselves to the party right before the incident performed an inexpert swan dive into a disaster.

**/ / / /**

< _Swindle! Come in already! The humans tried to drop a fission bomb on us!_ >

Crouching on a forested mountainside near the smouldering wreckage of what had been an energon production facility before Thundercracker had finished bombing it, Swindle cupped his hand over his audial and kept the volume turned down. Brawl wasn’t lowering his voice on the commlink. < _I fragging_ saw _. The video feed from the satellites was broadcasted live, I did pick up on it! What happened? Where the Pit are you?!_ >

< _What’s your coordinates?_ >

Swindle pinged him a data transmission and repeated himself. < _Where are you already? Weren’t you captured?_ >

In the background noise of Brawl’s comms, Swindle could hear air rushing past and the _thwap_ of rotor blades turning.

< _Er... Prime said they don’t have the resources to take prisoners, so the Autobots had to let us go after they beat us. We got outta’ there except then Onslaught was acting strange and then he collapsed and I had to drag him into Vortex’s cargo hold. And he still hasn’t woken up. M’telling Vortex to head towards the coordinates. Don’t go anywhere!_ >

< _Back up, Brawl, what do you mean_ Onslaught collapsed?>

< _A processor crash. He went down like somebody after Frenzy piledrives their knees. Dunno why. He did get punched, during the fighting, but nothing that knocked him offline._ >

< _Vortex, can you do anything about it?_ >

Vortex’s engine snarled. < _I’ll try when we land._ >

Swindle paced back and forth in front of the warehouse he picked to stockpile the energon from the humans. It was the location he had sent the coordinates for to Brawl. He had a secondary and smaller cache elsewhere in which he’d squirrelled away as much energon as he’d dared pilfer from _that_ stockpile. He’d keep the secondary cache a secret from his team. Just in case. 

Vortex landed, his spinning rotors kicking up a swirl of dead leaves. His side door opened and Brawl clambered out. He was supporting Onslaught’s frame, the truck’s arm slung over his shoulders. Onslaught’s visor was dark.

“He still hasn’t regained consciousness?” Swindle asked.

Brawl shook his helm. “The processor crash hit him hard.”

Vortex transformed, metal clattering. He, Brawl, and Onslaught each bore blast marks and scuffs from the skirmish. Vortex’s cockpit windows were broken. A weapon mounted on his shoulder dangled, knocked askew. Swindle counted himself lucky he’d had the smarts to beg Onslaught to give him the part of the mission that was out of the line of fire.

Vortex’s visor narrowed at the warehouse. 

“How much did you steal before Thundercracker torched the facilities?”

Swindle scratched the back of his helm. “Well. About… one-third of what we were aiming for. It’ll last us… eleven months?” And that was even if he had included his secondary cache of skimmed-off energon in that estimation instead of omitting it. It would still be that low.

Vortex hissed. “Great. Fragging humans. ’Don’t worry, as long as we stick to my plan, everything will go perfectly.’ Yeah, boss, there’s the reality check you’re not right every time.” He flexed his claws and looked murderous. “Our employers can’t pay us to put up with their rudeness anymore, so the contract’s _over_. I’ll patch myself up, refuel, then I’ll take a look at whatever made Onslaught crash on us.”

He stalked into the warehouse, squeezing through the entrance, and Swindle didn’t go after him. Steering clear of Vortex in an unstable mood was the better thing to do.

Brawl hauled Onslaught to the warehouse and propped their unconscious commander up against its front.

Swindle coughed into his fist.

“What happened to your cannon?” Swindle asked and cast about for the names of the Autobots stranded on Earth. There was that one minibot who boasted about his strength. (Swindle had sold him a disc of magna march recordings twelve thousand years ago. Not that the Autobot had known which vendor he was buying from.) “Was it Brawn?” Brawl’s cannon barrel was crumpled to the extent it resembled somebody doing their best to fold it in half like it was a plastic noodle. It _drooped_.

Like a newspark who had lost a toy, Brawl kicked at the dirt. “No. Jazz jumped me from behind while I was trying to blast Prowl to the Afterspark. And he tried to stab me. Sneaky _glitch_.”

When an hour passed and Onslaught came to, it was to the sight of Brawl and Swindle sitting in front of a rigged-up television and watching the humans on a news channel shrieking.

**/ / / /**

Blast Off returned from patrol to find the base a hotbed of activity. That made him suspicious.

Their outpost was far from the frontlines and it had no planetary resources of note for mining. Its main purpose was to serve as a link in a greater supply chain and as a place to dump injured Decepticon soldiers until they were repaired and could be transferred to the battlefront. Remoteness and lack of strategic importance guaranteed no Autobots would waste their firepower attacking it. 

Those same factors promised openings to advance your rise through the ranks in battle were nonexistent so no officers in the higher echelons ever visited. 

The last visitors of note had been haggard-opticked Decepticons from not too long ago, survivors fleeing Garrus-9 en mass. Squeezeplay had run across the first stragglers on a patrol and brought them back. They’d been sheparded into the medbay, claiming the Wreckers had retaken the prison and yattering about Overlord. 

Impactor had killed Overlord. Overlord had ordered the Autobot prisoners of war killed in their cells the moment the Wreckers arrived. Impactor and Grimlock had escaped and cooperated to give Springer a bypass through the lattice field. Ultra Magnus had assumed control over Garrus-9 as its warden because the hunk of tortured metal that had been Fortress Maximus had finally expired, no, Ultra Magnus had been after the big computer in its lower levels and somebody else was the warden now, Ultra Magnus hadn’t stuck around. _Springer_ had killed Overlord and Impactor had been in a different part of the prison at the time. 

No, you’re both wrong, pinheads, Springer was already dead by then and so was Impactor, a little red minibot and some Autobot nobody did the deed and killed Overlord! And Grimlock wasn’t the one who let them in, it was an inside job. A Decepticon had sold secret access codes to the Wreckers, just like an Autobot sold their codes to the Decepticons for the Surge.

Some of the Decepticons laughed about how much fun Garrus-9 had been. Others were silent.

It had made Blast Off think of corridors and a basement and also energon splatters.

A bright red sky.

He stayed away from the medbay.

A handful of other Decepticons from that floating rock had trickled in, bearing similar news and assorted degrees of relief at having put multiple galaxies between themselves and Overlord.

If it was more along the lines of that old tune, the base wouldn’t be buzzing like this. Blast Off walked to the mess hall. He elbowed through the crowd. A courier was in the center of it, standing on a table and speaking as quickly as he could.

“What’s happening?” Blast Off questioned one of the grunts at the edge of the crowd.

The grunt jerked a thumb at the courier and said, “A messenger from the asteroid High Command’s stationed on. Communication protocols are working again. Lord Megatron has re-established contact. He’s back. He’s reclaimed leadership from Starscream. And he’s going to make a move to crush the Autobot resistance on Earth, once and for all.”

**/ / / /**

Hook proclaimed not only was he unsurprised that a _mediocre hack_ like Vortex couldn’t diagnose a simple malfunction, but that even in filthy and subpar conditions like the shoddy excuse for a medbay he had to labor in, an accomplished medic like himself had located, diagnosed, and treated the injury in a matter of hours after the Combaticons had regrouped with the other Decepticons and delivered their _pedantic twit_ of a leader into his care. 

Hook was infamous throughout the faction for his lack of anything approaching decent berthside manners. 

But his current behavior was something else beyond even that. 

When Swindle compared the medic’s attitude in the present to Hook’s attitude during the construction of the starship, Swindle could see recent circumstances had shifted Hook’s abrasive demeanor from grating to outright intolerable.

(Scrapper’s corpse was laid out on a makeshift autopsy table in the corner. Generator lights strung up on the walls flickered over its grey plating.

It was missing its helm. 

Spike Witwicky’s handiwork. 

The human had won a whole combiner team’s loathing with that stunt. It was _almost_ impressive.

The last several months had proved the surviving Constructicons weren’t in the mood to do anything besides violently stew over their loss. Bonecrusher’s degrading grip over his temper erupted into daily scuffles during his duty shifts that had to be broken up, Hook locked himself into the medbay and slung increasingly disdainful insults left and right at everybody who didn’t hold rank over him and therefore couldn’t jam their foot up the aft of their lone on-planet medic to make him _shut up_ , Mixmaster stared into the distance and dropped non sequiturs at inappropriate moments, Scavenger crept around like a glitchmouse, and Loud Haul looked drawn and harried.)

Onslaught’s processor crash had happened because he had suffered from an electrical build-up in the circuitry that fed the brain module data from the left audial. The cerebral circuitry had been damaged and a minor glitch in the programming for the self-repair nanites had worsened the injury, though it went _without_ saying Hook had _flawlessly_ repaired it. Not that the boorish oafs populating the base appreciated his skills!

“He’ll be fine,” Hook had snapped nastily when he emerged from the medbay and went on, “It’s no more serious than a human getting a concussion. He’s the _third_ case I’ve had to treat in the last two weeks. First Wildrider and then that dimwit Octane, after Octane was so gormless as to shoot himself in the leg when he had a crash! Now him!” 

He’d jabbed a finger at the line-up of Combaticons in the hallway outside the medbay, who were barely restraining the urge to punch him in the face over his condescending tone. “This specific malfunction is incurred from a blow to the head while in alt mode. How did you lot fail to notice the _obvious_ symptoms? Left untreated, it results in erratic behavior, increased irritability, short-term difficulties accessing memory files, headaches, and processor crashes.”

Vortex and Brawl had exchanged a look.

“He was acting weird and not like normal, before he crashed,” Brawl had said.

“I don’t see him having memory problems,” Vortex had flicked his rotors. “But Onslaught _did_ mention he had a headache, the day before the Autobots ambushed us.”

Standing next to Brawl, Swindle had awkwardly paged through his own recollections. Onslaught had forgotten details like Blast Off not being on Earth in front of Swindle. Onslaught had had a visible dent on the left side of his helm when Swindle rescued him. Swindle zipped his mouth shut.

Hook had released Onslaught from the medbay the same day.

The Decepticons were immersed in coordinating the departure plans for once the new spacebridge on Earth was completed and Megatron was positioned on Cybertron to open the other side of it. Vortex and Brawl joined the bustle. Onslaught vanished into meetings with the high ranking officers. Swindle had his orders from the upper ranks to attend to. The hourly reports sent back by the facsimile Swindle had popped out of its growth tube, pale and wet and squishy, and trotted off to put cracks in the Autobot alliance with the humans tallied its results well. 

Human hate was a breeze to cash in on. An inexhaustible resource. 

And the facsimile—Ben Simpson—the facsimile was programmed to say _just_ the things to propagate that hatred. Stroking the fires. Smearing reputations. Feeding the online mutterings about aliens in the forums the facsimile moderated. Making them _frightened_.

People would do crazy things to silence their fears.

Megatron wanted to distribute guns to humans? Swindle had no complaints. A sale was a sale. Frightened humans bought guns in droves. 

Life should’ve been great. Except Swindle kept having to play a game of Dodge-The-Stunticons whenever he hung out by himself anywhere in the base too long. Mechs could hold a grudge. Swindle wasn’t keen on receiving a beating. It was to his relief that the Stunticons were forced to spend part of their shifts cooped up in Shockwave’s cobbled-together lab. Those were the times where he could grab energon without checking around the corners first.

The game didn’t escape Onslaught’s notice. He emerged from one of the meetings to say, “Shockwave and Bombshell pass along their compliments. They appreciate having another combiner to collect data on.” Onslaught put a hand on his hip. “Motormaster, meanwhile, hopes you rot in the Pit. He wants to kick your tailpipe for selling his team faulty gestalt tech and then leaving them to rust.”

“Sheesh. He never _asked_ if I had troubleshooted the tech before I reformatted them,” Swindle insisted. And like Motormaster wouldn’t have left Swindle high and dry in a sparkbeat if he had been in Swindle’s place. “Not my fault. Plus, they’re the ‘bots who couldn’t hold Menasor together. I didn’t tell ‘em to fight each other, I told ‘em to fight the Autobots.”

“The Stunticons don’t share your views on the matter,” Onslaught observed.

Swindle chuckled, a sound that came out strained. “I’ve noticed. It’s ah, how should I put it? It’s bothersome.”

“I’m not letting Motormaster get it into his helm that he has a right to discipline _my_ subordinates,” Onslaught said curtly. “The army is going to be split in two soon. Myself and Vortex will be part of the Cybertron detachment. Since you will be remaining on Earth, I’ve assigned Brawl to remain behind as well.” Onslaught’s field gained a sardonic twist. “The Stunticons wouldn’t go after you two together.” 

Onslaught’s field smoothed out again. He leaned down and planted a big finger on Swindle’s chest plating. “And you… You _will_ refrain from making more enemies until we’re done with Earth. Or I’ll know why. Megatron’s seeing traitors in every shadow, since our first campaign here failed. Don’t give him a cue to turn that suspicion on us.”

**/ / / /**

It was blue and clear outside, with the midday sun shining over the green lawns of a suburban neighborhood, and Breakdown had just thrown both human traffic laws and caution to the wind and tried to run Spike Witwicky down in broad daylight. 

Swindle would have loved to pretend that he had been behind this. But truth be told, he wasn’t. He and the Stunticons weren’t on friendly speaking terms. Breakdown was probably trying to kill Witwicky on his own over what Witwicky had used him for while in captivity. Swindle had just borrowed some remote surveillance gear and been tailing Prowl and his flunky, who had been tailing Witwicky, whom the Autobots had developed suspicions towards—pity the Autobots were yet to realize how on-the-dot those suspicions were—and Breakdown had come catapulting towards the human. Witwicky saved itself from becoming a red smear across the pavement by hurdling itself out of the way in the nick of time, shouting. Breakdown’s charge down the street missed it. 

The human scrambled away. Breakdown’s tires squealed, spinning around to make a second go at it. Sirens flashed as Prowl intervened.

Swindle followed the chase through the surveillance equipment, two Autobots speeding after Breakdown, sirens whooping, until their pursuit was tripped up by Prowl’s flunky bursting out of alt mode only to be scolded. The real human police rolled onto the crime scene.

Hours later Breakdown trudged into the base hours like a kicked dog, his hood bearing the marks of Streetwise’s blows. 

Upside to this: Breakdown’s failed hit-and-run in a public area had given him free fodder to poison the Autobots' PR with. The facsimile had already posted to its forums about doing a phone interview for the news outlet to share the group’s opinion on aliens being responsible. So handy! Downside: Prowl’s investigation into a past customer like Witwicky had the risk of busting the weapon-running operation Swindle was using the facsimile for if Prowl prodded too deep. That risk was what had prompted Swindle into following him to start with.

In search of a killing machine to point in Prowl’s direction, and thinking of a tank who’d had complained of going stir-crazy from lack of combat, Swindle slinked into Brawl’s quarters in the evening. “Hey, Brawl. Wanna’ go bust heads?” Swindle schmoozed. Brawl perked up. Swindle producing a bottle from his new engex stash perked him up further. One empty bottle later, one pliable tank. It took more than that to get Brawl drunk. He was just teetering on tipsy.

“Okay, so which Autobot are we killing? Prowl?” Brawl asked eagerly, once Swindle had given him an abridged rundown and he had agreed to it. 

It was nice, how little push Brawl needed to kill anything.

“Got it in one,” said Swindle, patting his shoulder. 

Brawl slammed a fist into his palm. His ventilations stank of engex.

“Yeah. ’M down for that. Turning Prowl into _scrap_.”

“Us two, your firepower and my smarts, taking out a bigshot Autobot tactician solo ‘cuz Prowl was too busy kowtowing to the humans to see us coming! Ons and Tex would be impressed.”

“YEAH!”

Coaxing Brawl to let him implant the booby-trap mechanisms under the guise of updating his system’s insulation from the mode-locks (“Just in case the Autobots switched up the model they’re using! It’s no biggie, it’ll only take five minutes if you shut down! Trust me.”) was a cheap trick. 

Swindle knew it, felt vaguely bad about it, and did it anyway. 

Fingers in the wiring of Brawl’s processor, Swindle told himself it wouldn’t be needed. Nothing would go wrong. They would dispatch Prowl and Brawl wouldn’t be captured so the trap wouldn’t be triggered. With Prowl dead and Witwicky not being investigated about his possible links to Cybertronian arms marketeering and therefore to Swindle anymore, the trail would go cold. Swindle would resume fleecing his customers. Brawl would have something to brag about to the rest of the team. No harm done. Nobody the wiser. Swindle was just being careful.

They tailed Prowl the next night, following him to a human business complex. 

A skyscraper.

The attack they mounted ended with the skyscraper in ruins, Brawl captured and Swindle running away once again into the night, cursing. 

Damnit. 

Alone, he didn’t have the resources to rescue Brawl. Especially since the trap he’d implanted would be sending Brawl into stasis lock within the next five hours. He couldn’t request reinforcements from the other Decepticons, not when that meant admitting he had fouled an ambush up in the first place. Prowl was intelligent. He would keep investigating. Swindle had to get rid of the paper trail first. Scrub the evidence of transactions from the internet. Move the facsimile’s operations to a different state.

It didn’t work. 

The Autobots caught up to ‘Ben Simpson’ and raided his house within two days. Shoot a facsimile? It dropped dead like any other organic. The jig was up. Swindle cut the remote signal he had been using to wipe the incriminating data from the facsimile’s computer and peeled out of the parking garage he’d been hiding in, wheels hitting the road, and hightailed it the moment his radar registered Prowl’s energy signature approaching the garage.

He turned a corner and smashed headlong into a large and blue set of unmoving feet. 

A _familiar_ set of unmoving feet. 

Audials ringing from the impact, Swindle instinctively recoiled and back into root mode, landing on his rear. “Swindle,” rumbled Ultra Magnus.

 _Scrap_. 

Swindle yanked his blaster from subspace.

Ultra Magnus slammed a foot into his forearm before he could squeeze the trigger. The blaster’s barrel veered off-target. Ultra Magnus’s aim was unerring. He blasted Swindle in his arm, neatly severing it from his shoulder. Swindle shrieked. Electricity flew. Swindle’s blaster dropped from limp fingers and clattered onto the pavement. “You’re under arrest,” Ultra Magnus informed him as he had half a hundred times before.

**/ / / /**

Sweeps.

Cybertron was _infested_ with Sweeps. 

They swarmed across the dark skies in a black mass, blotting out what the haze of fumes and swirling grit didn’t cloak. The air echoed with shouts and tearing metal and electricity and flashes of light. At the center of the melee, thongs of Autobots and Decepticons divided their efforts between shooting at each other and shooting at the Sweeps. Onslaught was reloading his gun when laserfire took out three Sweeps at once. < _There you are!_ > Somebody called over their channel, and a less hostile figure swooped downward through the cacophony of battle to greet them. 

“Blast Off!” Onslaught immediately turned in his direction. “What was the hold up?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but for every five we kill, ten more Sweeps replace it,” Blast Off said, pulling up midair and hovering. His leg cannons were locked into firing positions and hummed with energy. His tone was colored with an audible smile, masked face turned towards Onslaught’s position. “ _That_ , I don’t appreciate. Is there an end to them?”

“Ask Galvatron. Did the rest of the scouting team make it?”

Blast Off shook his helm. “Sweeps attacked us while we were in orbit, collecting mapping data. We expected a mindless Swarm, not Sweeps. We were outnumbered. I survived, so did another shuttle. I lost track of him. Everybody else was killed.”

A volley sang out, heat and bullets rushing overhead. Frames fell.

“Chitchat later! Kill them now!” Vortex barked. He was brandishing an energon-coated blade in each hand. More Sweeps were coming.

Consecutive volleys whited out the night in blindingly stark relief, then faded away.

“Up for more target practice, sir?” Blast Off said.

“Of course,” Onslaught replied. He leveled his gun at the horde and fired.

**/ / / /**

The first thought Swindle had after Ultra Magnus roused him from his cell, escorted him out of the ship in stasis cuffs, the side of his helm still twinging from the deterrence chip implanted into it, through the shantytown huddled around the wreckage of the research station, and into Kimia’s barrel where the rest of the defeated Decepticons had been penned up, was how little of a fan he was of the crowd’s racket echoing off the walls.

Ultra Magnus removed the stasis cuffs and left without another word, jaw set and fists clenched.

(War had a way of draining the humor from some bots millenia by millenia. Ultra Magnus had been _quippy_. Cheerful even! The Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord had duly appreciated a good joke or two while arresting a wayward entrepreneur like Swindle. These days jokes had become a foreign language to Big Blue And Righteous. A miniature thundercloud of seriousness hung around him like his personal weather system. Little bolts of stringent judgement jetting over the clouds. Forecasts predicted showers of disapproval in the future, followed by a strong probability of tiny squalls of strictness in the evening. Bring an umbrella! 

Swindle kinda missed the banter.)

Swindle rubbed his wrists and looked around at the Decepticons milling about. 

The second thought he had was _scrap, is that Onslaught_? Striding through the crowds, fury pouring off him, Onslaught bore down on Swindle. And Swindle’s fuel pump shrivelled up. Right on Onslaught’s heels was Vortex, Blast Off, and _Brawl_. Brawl was awake, visor burning. The Autobots must have finished Brawl’s repairs en route to Cybertron without telling Swindle. (Swindle and Brawl hadn’t been locked up in the same cell.) 

And Brawl had been dumped into Kimia first.

Yeah. That would explain why Onslaught looked thunderous. If he talked fast, he could do damage control on this. Swindle went for the placating angle. “Yo, long time no see, guys! Blast Off, on the end of the road to recovery? That’s great, that’s just great. I’m glad you’re back on your feet, Braw—”

Onslaught was having none of it.

“Swindle. A _word_. In private.” 

**/ / / /**

Dangling high in the air, Swindle clawed frantically at the hand wrapped tight around his throat, the powerful grip compressing the air filter and squeezing the cables uncomfortably. Suddenly, the idea of pulling one past Onslaught no longer seemed as smart of a plan as it had seemed on Earth when Onslaught had been weakened, starving, and concussed from untreated injuries. It seemed even less of a smart plan with the three other Combaticons loitering outside the backroom Onslaught had dragged him into, waiting for Onslaught to finish discipling him.

“It was just a safety measure! I didn’t mean anything by it! Brawl’s an idiot, he babbles! I had to take precautions!” Swindle pleaded. His feet kicked at the air uselessly.

“Precautions to protect your own interests at the expense of your teammate,” Onslaught’s voice had gone past furious and entered the territory of viciously calm. “Precautions you didn’t tell Brawl about nor did you secure my permission before doing it.” The light in his visor flattened into a crimson slit. “Perhaps this is a misunderstanding. Have I been unclear in the past? Did I neglect to convey to you that you are not in command of this team?”

Swindle choked out. “N-No.”

Onslaught’s grip constricted, cutting off the energon flow. 

Swindle corrected himself. “Nnugh. No, _sir_!”

The grip loosened.

“Then enlighten me. Does a subordinate have any place interfering with their commander’s authority?”

Swindle debated running off his mouth, but he was in deep enough slag. No sense in digging the hole deeper, not when the other Combaticons would side with Onslaught over him when they were angry at him for this. “No, sir.”

“Does a subordinate have any place going behind their commander’s back like this?”

“No, sir!”

“Then what possessed you to imagine booby-trapping Brawl’s processor was something _you could get away with_?”

Swindle squealed as Onslaught’s fingers tightened again. Was his air filter going to need repairs after this? “A precaution! It only knocked him out! It wouldn’t have hurt for more than a couple se-seconds—Hgnrk.” He clawed at Onslaught’s hand. “Autobots wouldn’t do nothin’ to ‘im while he was stasis locked, c-c’mon, sir! Easily fixed!”

“The Autobot medic who spent hours operating on Brawl’s processor to bring him out of stasis lock would beg to differ,” Onslaught gritted, “You shouldn’t have done it to begin with.”

“It wouldn’t have been a big deal if he hadn’t been captured!”

“Wrong.”

Swindle had a split second’s warning before his back slammed into the wall. The wall cracked. The room spun out of focus. Swindle’s pained yelp bubbled from him as an aborted half-wheeze, half moan. Onslaught pinned him in place, Swindle’s legs still not within reach of the floor.

“Now, Swindle. Did you put any of that tampering in my head?”

Swindle’s burst of fear was unfeigned.

“Nu-huh! I ain’t suicidal!” 

It was one thing to screw with Vortex or Brawl. Technically speaking, they held the same rank as Swindle. He wasn’t going against the chain of command. Even doing it to Blast Off would have been pushing his luck, seeing as Blast Off’s position as second in command and favored underling had him solidly outranking Swindle. Doing it to his commanding officer would have been no laughing matter and not something the Decepticons would have suffered so kindly.

If he’d screwed with Onslaught like that, for the sake of profit, it would be crossing a line and Onslaught would have responded by blasting Swindle’s head off and leaving his corpse to rust in a ditch. Swindle liked his head where it was: attached to his shoulders.

Onslaught didn’t care what they did to outsiders.

Swindle could booby-trap all the processors it pleased him to and it would’ve passed unremarked upon, provided he hadn’t done it to a fellow Combaticon.

Onslaught accepted the answer. His ire failed to evaporate.

“Would time in the brig cool off your attempts to undermine me? I ought to have you court martialed,” Onslaught sneered. Swindle would have wheezed a sparkfelt objection, except Onslaught followed up by releasing his hold on Swindle’s throat. The con-mech crashed to the floor. Resetting his intake, Swindle’s hands shot to his neck cables, the energon properly flowing again. Partially-crushed air filters were unpleasant, not to mention made it harder to regulate his frame’s temperature control.

Onslaught crossed his arms over his chassis. “But we don’t have a brig and the army is in shambles.”

Swindle muttered. “Pragmatism strikes again. Real nice of you, sir.”

Onslaught lifted an optical ridge. “I could let Brawl in here and have him decide how you should pay for tricking him.”

“Ohh. No, I’ll pass on that!” Swindle said, putting up his hands.

Onslaught, as Swindle’s commander, was responsible for Swindle. Many Cybertronians (Autobot, Decepticon, or otherwise) were happy to purchase Swindle’s dubious services, bribe him for special items, resources, trinkets from home, outrageous requests—but absolutely _none_ of them wanted to be saddled with the momentous and endlessly frustrating task of Swindle-wrangling. 

For good reason.

Controlling his frustration, Onslaught ground his denta. “Use your head and think of an apology so Brawl doesn’t try to tear your arms out and beat you unconscious with them when you walk out of this room.”

**/ / / /**

Three weeks after he shoved the Matrix into Vector Sigma, Optimus Prime walked out of the wilderness and discovered defeating Galvatron and preventing the dead universe from absorbing everything into itself hadn’t solved the rest of Cybertron’s problems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Onslaught: Swindle, I’m leaving you unsupervised for ten minutes. don’t do anything that would reflect badly on me.  
> Swindle: sure thing!  
> Swindle: (immediately fails to control his greed, does a lot of stuff, puts a booby-trap in Brawl’s brain without telling Brawl, gets both himself and Brawl captured by Autobots)  
> Onslaught:  
> Onslaught: you


	8. the landscape after cruelty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> War’s over. On Cybertron, things change but not necessarily for the better.

Inside Kimia’s barrel, there had been rubble smashed apart and sprayed everywhere from the research station dropping out of orbit and crashing into Cybertron. And dead Sweeps too. Before moving the Decepticons they had rounded up inside, the Autobots had combed through Kimia, grimly searching for survivors that might have evaded the Sweeps but failed to reach Kimia’s escape pods with the others in time and, when it became clear there were no new survivors from Cyclonus and Scourge’s massacre to be found, for their comrades’ bodies. 

Or what was left of the bodies after the Sweeps had finished with them. 

The dead Autobots had been removed from the facility, to be identified and mourned.

And the Sweeps had been piled in heaps in the wastelands and unceremoniously smelted in a lava river.

There had been too many bearded and greyed out bodies back then, clogging Kimia’s passageways or crushed under a toppled recharge slab. Not all of them had been collected. Poke about in a corridor and a mech could tread on a severed leg or find a fragment of a Sweep’s jaw with the denta still embedded in it. 

The Constructicons had to clear leftover Sweeps and rocks away, and slapped together rudimentary barracks on the ground level for the Decepticons who hadn’t grabbed a backroom. The Constructicons had bashed jagged carvasses into the wall for additional quarters and after the grounders had lodged complaints that only the _fliers_ could get up to the upper spots without a hassle, they had added ladders and extended ledges. 

The upper ranks—Shockwave, Starscream, and Soundwave, though Soundwave was nursing a rushed repair job on his damaged vocalizer from the Earth campaign and hissed eerie static in the place of words—had withdrawn into their quarters in the barracks and posted Soundwave’s cassettes as guards to ward away eavesdroppers, leaving the rest of the prisoners to noisily quarrel and stake out parts of the barrel for themselves.

The Predacons and the Stunticons had brawled over one of the low lying rooms in the wall that both groups had wanted to recharge in—the Stunticons had won, and the Predacons had clambered off the ledge and advanced on a cluster of grunts who had occupied a different set of quarters. Tantrum growled and Rampage showed the grunts his claws. Hint taken, the grunts had evacuated their quarters and scattered to find refuge elsewhere. The Predacons had moved in and dragged a hunk of machinery in front of the opening to the room, a hint just as pointed that the other troops would be wise to leave them be. 

The displaced grunts had trudged past Buzzsaw, perched on a bent railing that encircled where Blast Off had been standing. Buzzsaw cocked his head, beady optics tracking them before his gaze darted to where the Stunticons were celebrating the team’s newly claimed quarters above.

Even further up the wall above the Stunticons’ quarters, the Seekers who had followed Starscream and the stray fliers who were previously under Skyquake’s command had assembled. One could count the sets of wings flying in and out. Acid Storm’s lurid green, Sunstorm’s yellow, Skywarp’s purple and black, Dirge’s blue and golden, and a dozen more colors. 

Buzzsaw clacked his beak and flapped away from the railing to join his fellow monitor Laserbeak in circling the barrel’s airspace. 

Blast Off didn’t care for being a prisoner. But he had overheard one or two Decepticons muttering since nobody had resorted to cannibalism, they were in a better shape than on the asteroid. More disputes over who would recharge where escalated into tussles. The winners had first servings and the losers had what was left. Mindwipe, Squawktalk, and Triggerhappy camped in the barracks, sandwiched next to where Needlenose and Horri-Bull were staying. The triple-changers had a room to themselves. Bombshell, Kickback, and Shrapnel had nested in one of Kimia’s workshops and Bombshell was seen scuttling about outside of it more rarely than the other two Insecticons were. 

The Combaticons had seized a backroom on the opposite side of Kimia’s barrel from the Predacons. They rooted in a computer console’s wiring until the computer came online and the screen glowed blue. The locking mechanism controls on the door were missing. Somebody had torn the control panel from the wall wholesale and walked away with it five days into confinement. 

The backroom’s ceiling lights had been an easier fix and stayed illuminated for most of the night. 

(Nobody had explained to Blast Off’s satisfaction _why_ they were avoiding the Predacons. It had something to do with Earth. The secondhand details he had picked up about the campaign on that dirtball weren’t enough to fill in the gaps.)

Weeks had marched on.

The Autobots had held a memorial service. For the crew that had signed up with Rodimus and then been vaporized into a smear of loose atoms in the atmosphere when their ship’s launch had gone sideways. 

When quantum jumps went wrong, they had an inclination to do so in a patently fatal manner. 

Over two hundred Cybertronians, dead instantly. 

Bloodlessly.

Unlike Ratbat receiving a sword through his chest. 

Prowl and his flunkies had removed Ratbat’s frame from the wall and were selling scrap about it being a suicide, but Blast Off rolled his optics. _Anybody_ with a functioning processor could see that it had been an assassination. Nobody had liked Ratbat and the universe was no worse off for the mech no longer being in it, but the Decepticons liked being lied to even less. 

The uproar had gone on for the whole night.

And more trouble followed in its wake, like smoke pouring out after a fire was set. 

Starscream paid the Combaticons a visit. 

(Blast Off regarded this intrusion as proof they should have the control panel for the door’s locking mechanisms replaced.)

Onslaught and Starscream traded customary barbs before they eventually cut to the chase. Politics. In the Decepticon body of social norms there was no shame to opening negotiations, to bluntly trading favors and what else might be up for sale, in order to secure what one wanted. The four Combaticons present in the room weren’t privy to what went on in High Command’s meetings. The meetings couldn’t be panning out as Starscream preferred them to, if he was scouting for supporters behind the scene like this. 

Starscream proposed an alliance. 

He emphasized to them, at length, that the Decepticons who threw in their lot with him in such _uncertain times_ would be richly reimbursed for their choice.

Onslaught didn’t seize the bait. He demurred, indicating Starscream was making a number of fine promises and of course Onslaught had _nothing_ but respect for a superior officer, but the Combaticons expected to be given more than nice-sounding words. 

In fact, why shouldn’t they think twice about such words, if one reviewed the context the words were being given in? They’d heard about Starscream giving a rousing speech, up there on the stage with the Autobots and the NAILs. Were the Autobots not giving him a sufficiently warm welcome?

“I had to get my foot back in the political arena. What’s token lip service to the Autobots’ party line for the sake of a bright future?” Starscream rebutted. “ _My_ career’s bright future, to be precise.” The jet didn’t skip a beat. “Don’t get the wrong idea, Onslaught. I didn’t mean a bit of it and I’m not on the Autobots’ side. I’m sure a tactician like yourself understands that.”

Onslaught motioned an acknowledgement. 

“Not all battles are won by force. It’s a rational tactic to secure your position. Others in the ranks will still view it as fraternization. It will land a target on your back.”

Vortex sat on a berth, legs crossed. “Not that’s anything new to you.” His visor gleamed. “Say, are you in league with Prowl these days or did you back up his story about Ratbat in front of a mob of angry ‘cons just for kicks?” 

Occupied by pawing through the box of junk on his lap that he’d bartered for from a newly arrived neutral, Swindle’s optics briefly darted towards Starscream. 

Standing in the doorway to the Combaticons’ quarters, Starscream pressed his claws to the plating that covered his spark.

“Can’t I be _helpful_ and assist in propping up our quaint post-war government so it’s still in one piece to take control of later?” Starscream snorted. “And between you and me, I’m not facing stiff competition for the top spot in Iacon. Metalhawk and the yellow runt aren’t what _I_ would call outstanding leadership material.”

Blast Off and Vortex shared glances behind Onslaught’s back.

Interest rippled through Onslaught’s field for the first time in the conversation. 

“True. Bumblebee is a people-pleaser with no experience in handling authority and Metalhawk is a coward who wants to control a planet he didn’t fight for. Neither have what it takes to get results when push comes to shove.”

“The Autobots have a stronger position than us, but they picked poorly when it came to their new leader,” Blast Off said. “If Bumblebee holds on, he’s probably going to wind up a figurehead for Prowl.”

Onslaught nodded.

“They couldn’t even keep their peace without resorting to using Decepticons as enforcers.”

Starscream’s smirk widened, his optics glittering in sly challenge. “We’re in agreement there. Leadership’s been long overdue for a turnover after four million years of the _same_ old, _same old_ , I can’t deny it. With the proper hands on the reins…! We could get _results_ , no more slogging through the motions.” 

“Your hands.”

“Yes,” Starscream said. “It’s just that I would recharge _so_ much easier knowing if mechs with a grudge or well-armed patriots get the wrong impression about where my true allegiance lies, the Combaticons would be among those ready and waiting to _correct_ them.” 

Patriots, when you used the word in the context of Decepticon loyalties and repercussions for fraternization, had a strong association with a single division.

Blast Off’s mouth flattened into a hard line behind his mask.

The DJD.

Onslaught’s thoughts ran along similar tracks. It colored his response.

“We’ve handled jobs like that before,” Onslaught said. “Except not when we might be pitted against mechs who were appointed by Megatron to be judge, jury, and executioners.”

Starscream sighed. Solemnity oozed from his vocalizer, slick and weighty. “The DJD are dreadfully quick to jump to conclusions when a Decepticon and an Autobot meet and don’t try to kill each other on principle. The war’s over. Ingratiating myself to the Autobots so I can barter for us Decepticons won’t fly, because Tarn has unfairly had it out for me—” 

(Out of nowhere Blast Off suffered a coughing fit in the background.

Starscream artfully ignored him.)

“—for centuries. He’ll snap up an excuse if it lands in his lap. The _ideological purity_ of their loyalty to the Cause is to be applauded, as is their impeccable mimicry of organic attack dogs gone _rabid_ —” 

(Swindle also experienced a sudden and muffled wheezing-coughing fit, clapping a hand over his mouth and repeatedly resetting his vocalizer, optics watering. Vortex thumped him on the back. Onslaught kept the look in his visor carefully bland.)

“—but Megatron is yesterday’s news, same as Optimus Prime. It’s time to be practical.”

Starscream cocked an optical ridge.

“Well? What do you say? Deal or no deal?”

The other Combaticons looked to their leader. 

“If you’re so worried about the DJD or somebody else coming in the night, Starscream, we can _help_. For a _price_.” Onslaught said after a few more moments of deliberation. 

Onslaught looked at the flecks of red paint from where Vortex had scratched off the Autobot brand on the computer equipment they had salvaged from their quarters and repaired into an usable condition. “I know a losing hand when I see it.” His gaze returned to Starscream. Onslaught named his price. “However this shakes out, if you end up on top, you take us with you.”

Starscream extended a hand. 

“Sounds like we’re in business.”

They shook on it.

**////**

“This bargain with Starscream,” Blast Off said hours later.

He and Onslaught were outside Kimia. The smell of stale energon and pungent engine oil was carried by the wind to their olfactory sensors. 

Starships in every direction, mostly owned by neutrals—though there were a few ships that belonged to faction members—elongated and gray shapes jumbled into an unorganized, bustling amalgamation of pre-war Cybertronian and alien transport designs, curved surfaces inlaid with glowing viewports and raising in an uneven manner that was reminiscent of an urban skyline, interspersed with the permanent buildings that had sprouted on the ground like mushrooms; the Autobot medical facility and its outlying structures; haphazard towers and roadways and domes and pointed spires and five-story comm antennas and an unimpressive spaceport; a crappy bar or two, a storefront, the smudge of the outermost gates. Pedestrians were walking or floating or driving about. Again, mostly neutrals. 

(Blast Off felt ill at ease. Where was the military discipline? The training drills? Having lived so long within a pervasive web of regulations that governed everything from rations to hierarchy, seeing the neutrals going about their days without it stirred discontent and bafflement in Blast Off.)

He’d patiently waited until the other Combaticons were busy and he was alone with Onslaught to broach the subject. Onslaught preferred to not have his orders disputed where others could eavesdrop.

“What about it?”

“Are you certain it’s the best option to take? What about the rest of High Command?” Blast Off prodded. 

Onslaught hummed, indicating his confidence without dismissing Blast Off’s questions.

“Soundwave still hasn’t made a bid for leadership of the Decepticons in Megatron’s absence. Neither has Shockwave. Whatever conspiring they have between them, they’re not sharing the plan with the rest of us. It’s suspicious.” 

Blast Off ex-vented slowly.

“What could be keeping Megatron away? A ploy? Or could he be...”

“I’m not counting Megatron dead until I see his corpse with my own optics,” Onslaught said firmly. “And even then, I wouldn’t be convinced.”

“He’s an implausibly durable mech,” Blast Off allowed.

“Regardless of his status at this moment, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. We don’t need him. In the meantime, we should assume a worst case scenario. Megatron’s not going to swoop in to oust the Autobots and we’re on our own. We can't count on him,” Onslaught said. He put his hand briefly on Blast Off’s shoulder vent. “We must act to protect ourselves. Soundwave’s being too passive. I don’t trust Shockwave. I wouldn’t side with Starscream against Megatron during the war, but... In this instance, the odds are Starscream is our safest bet for getting out of this dump”—Onslaught took his hand away and his arm swept out to gesture at Kimia—”and being on the winning side.”

**////**

It was darkening in a steady creep towards evening. Brawl was pestering Onslaught. Swindle inserted himself into a game of Praxus Fold ‘Em run by Astrotrain and played by a lively Vortex, a bored Blitzwing, and a depressed-looking Dirge. Blast Off buried his nose into a datapad.

Onslaught sat up, suddenly going on the alert and holding up a hand to signal for Brawl to stop talking. Brawl didn’t stop talking. Onslaught covertly kicked him. The faint buzz of commlinks activating told Blast Off that somebody had opened a private channel to his leader. Blast Off formed no personal opinion on this one way or the other until Onslaught asked, “What do you _want_ , Starscream?” 

A pause. 

“There’s a situation?” 

Another pause.

“Hm. That’s a short window of time to move so many Cybertronians. And packing in NAILs with Decepticons is a recipe for di—”

The frequencies beeped with abrupt activity, indicating Starscream had impatiently sent him a data packet and Onslaught was scanning it. 

“Uh oh,” Onslaught muttered. 

“Should we run for cover?” Blast Off checked.

“Is there trouble? Can I punch somebody for it?” Brawl cracked his knuckles.

“One of the Autobot scientists figured out what’s causing the freak explosions lately and told Starscream. It’s not a bomber after all. It’s an energy reaction in the atmosphere. Another one’s about to hit Kimia.” Onslaught swung up onto his feet. “Starscream’s going to jam the NAILs into Kimia’s barrel with us where the explosion can be withstood. Wheeljack’s going to attempt to stop the explosion. _We’re_ going to help Starscream herd them in and see to it that nobody kills any of the NAILs under his ‘protection.’”

It was plain that Brawl was disappointed by this.

“Who gives a frag if a buncha’ NAILs wind up dead? I don’t,” Brawl opinionated.

“That’s why nobody in their right mind would hire you for a PR job, Brawl,” Onslaught retorted. “You don’t _have_ to care. And neither do I. Just let Starscream pretend he does.”

“Ugh,” was Brawl’s reply.

Blast Off tapped a finger on his datapad before he stowed it well into his subspace. 

“I, for one, would prefer to _not_ die in a random explosion because this problem wasn’t addressed. Tell us more about what’s going on and what to do, sir.”

Minutes after the last of the gathered neutrals had streamed into Kimia’s now-positively claustrophobic barrel and Starscream had made an exaggerated show of sealing the doors and the neutrals eyed the Decepticons in a manner typically reserved for being penned in with wild beasts and the Decepticons eyed them back with unabashed hostility, hackles raised, Cybertron’s latest attempt to kill its inhabitants culminated. 

Heavy treads ground to a halt outside. Parts whirred. Missiles launched—a telltale sound, _WHOOM_ , one, _WHOOM_ , two, _WHOOM_ , three missiles—and building pressure tightened in a band around Blast Off’s helm. 

Wavy lines scrolled down his HUD. Grainy dots danced in his field of vision. 

Blast Off tasted static electricity in his intake. 

Then the pressure was _released_. 

A shockwave pushed down on them as a giant hand would and people staggered. An audial-splitting distant thunderclap of light and heat signaled the anticipated explosion had been diverted to the air space above Kimia. 

Quiet descended.

“Wheeljack’s giving us the all-clear!” Starscream broke it. The mech was blatantly playing up his jubilance when the Autobot scientist commed him for his audience. Talk about over-acting. “The danger has passed, you may leave!”

The neutrals and the rest of the rabble drained from the barrel, led by Starscream and Metalhawk. Blast Off glanced to the left and to the right, his teammates dispersed throughout the masses where he couldn’t see them, and indulged a flicker of curiosity and tagged along, lingering on the edges, his field blank and pulled close to his plating. There were the Autobots. Prowl. Bumblebee. Wheeljack. Ironhide was climbing down from the operator’s seat of the mobile missile launch platform he’d used. 

In Kimia’s shadow, the two crowds merged together.

A different flavor of pressure thickened the air.

Under the surface of the fragile agreement to remain civil, tension and mistrust shimmered.

The back-and-forth between the opposing sides reflected that tension. Turning to Bumblebee, Wheeljack vouched for Starscream. Lurking in the crowd, Blast Off shook his helm in bemusement. Starscream’s efforts to bolster his untrustworthy reputation by helping the neutrals had… worked. It had netted him an advocate. Was it about to win him the allies and the foothold into the government he’d been after?

Bumblebee hadn’t rejected Wheeljack’s appeal.

 _A people-pleaser_ , Onslaught had called Bumblebee. 

Somebody too concerned about not being hated to get things ruthlessly done as a leader should.

Somebody who seemed to be in the process of evaluating what Wheeljack was suggesting and realizing that he needed to bend and make his own gesture towards the public right away to match Starscream’s actions or be outdone.

“I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” Bumblebee acceded. “But…—”

“No!”

A white and yellow flightframe kicked on his thrusters and lunged forward, slamming Bumblebee into the side of Kimia. Alarmed shouts arose from the Autobots. Wheeljack started forward. Even from afar, Blast Off could see the flightframe’s face twisting up in distraught fury. “What about everybody we lost? _What about all we gave up!?_ ”

“Look—” Bumblebee said, helplessly. The minibot tried to yank free. “I’m sorry, Silverbolt—”

“ _Sorry’s_ not _good enough!_ ”

Silverbolt roared and chucked Bumblebee to the side. 

In those wild blue optics, Blast Off read out the same resentful, feverish churning that had been brewing in Blitzwing’s visor and Astrotrain’s optics when an Autobot dropped off the fuel rations the Decepticons were allotted to. 

In Needlenose’s optics the day when he had left Kimia with Skywarp.

In Brawl’s visor when he had to pretend his deterrence chip was working and let the Autobots go on their patrols without attacking. 

“Don’t you _understand_?” Silverbolt thrust a finger in Starscream’s direction, looming over Bumblebee in the dirt, lips peeled back in a snarl. Bumblebee struggled upright, groping for his cane. 

“We fought his kind for millions of years, and _this_ is the reward you give us?” Silverbolt’s wings quivered. 

Wheeljack inched forward again, heading towards Bumblebee only to step back when Slingshot blocked his path. Air Raid joined Slingshot in a sparkbeat, fists raised. Hands kept deliberately open, Wheeljack adopted a mollifying posture and backed up. Slingshot sneered and stalked towards Silverbolt. Fireflight and Skydive weren’t as aggressive when they clustered behind Silverbolt, but the four mechs still telegraphed their intentions of backing Silverbolt up. 

The Aerialbots. Silverbolt’s team. 

“A planet that’s trying to kill us— _and Decepticons at our side?_ ”

You could say the war was supposed to be over until the stars burnt out, but that didn’t mean everybody believed it deep down in their sparks. In the aftermath, the war was an omnipresent shadow lurking behind every clash and under every surface. The war was still alive in Silverbolt’s mind, gripping him tight like a vice and tugging at him. 

An Aerialbot had been one of the casualties in the freak explosions.

Blast Off ventured to guess that made Silverbolt’s outlook less than benevolent.

Prowl intervened and stepped forward. “Silverbolt, I’ll keep my eye on him—”

Before Prowl could put his hand on Silverbolt’s shoulder, Silverbolt rounded on him and his swipe connected with Prowl’s front. 

“ _Don’t touch me!_ ”

Knocked down, Prowl’s back impacted the side of a building and put a dent in it.

“ _Look_ at yourself—what have you become!” Silverbolt flung his fury at them and sparked a chorus of angry reactions from Prowl and Bumblebee. 

Silverbolt was venting heavily, hands curled into fists, red biolights pulsing erratically. 

And after a couple more parting remarks about his opinion of Bumblebee and the Cybertronians supporting him, Silverbolt turned on his thrusters and walked away. Away from Kimia and the Decepticons and the Autobots, away from Iacon, and out into the wastelands. The clouds on the edge of the horizon were spread like translucent pink and red banners, bathed in the reddening light as the yellow dwarf star Cyberton orbited sank from view and the land shaded by dim gradations into dusk.

With a handful of lingering glances, at each other, then at the other Autobots, the Aerialbots followed Silverbolt out of Iacon. 

First Air Raid went, rashly racing ahead to catch up with Silverbolt. Next Slingshot, the lone Aerielbot who didn’t look back as he did so. Skydive did look back, hesitating, before nudging Fireflight in the side and walking away with his chin held up. Wide-opticked, Fireflight squeaked and dashed to follow the team, short wings bobbing. 

Whispers rose from some of the neutrals on the edge of the crowd where Blast Off was. They didn’t understand why the Aerialbots, who hadn’t flown into a rage like Silverbolt, had obeyed an order to strike out alone and leave everybody else behind.

(It was no wonder that they didn’t understand.

They didn’t have a team.

Blast Off had a team. He possessed no real sympathy for the Aerialbots’ plight; he just understood the choice they had made. Before they were Autobots, those five were Aerialbots. They had been Aerialbots at the war’s beginning and they had continued to be Aerialbots after the war had ended.

Silverbolt was the leader. 

He had the final say. What else could loyal subordinates do but follow?)

Silverbolt’s alt mode rose up into the wispy clouds, falling into formation with the other fliers. The Aerialbots dwindled to pinpoints in the distance. 

And they were gone. 

**////**

Within a week, there was talk of elections, somewhat improved conditions for the Decepticons courtesy of Starscream, and a murder.

A dead Decepticon. 

One of Skyquake’s former subordinates.

Blast Off hadn’t seen a reason for the Combaticons to get involved, until Swindle came scampering over to him and Onslaught one afternoon, and beckoned them into a deserted hallway. Swindle had coincidentally finished his shift working in the underground waste reclamation tunnels at the same time as Needlenose had. They had been leaving through an exit hatch when—seriously, get _this_ —Dirge had _torpedoed_ down like a demon from the Pit was after his spark and smashed into the ground in alt mode in front of them. The Conehead had been shaking so hard his plating rattled, his story of what had happened after he’d been detained by the Autobots for questioning about the first murder spilling from his mouth and into Swindle’s audials. 

“Prowl executed Bombshell and that maniac _Arcee’s_ helping him,” Swindle told them. Blast Off hadn’t known Arcee was still on the planet to begin with. “Dirge _saw_ Prowl do it. Blank-point, blew his brain module to _bits_! He tried to shoot Dirge and then he killed the Constructicons too. Dirge had to run away before Arcee offlined him.”

“Where is Dirge now?” Onslaught inquired.

“He’s hiding.” Swindle looked shiftily left to right, and belatedly lowered his voice. The walls might have audials hidden in them. “Uh, sir. With Needlenose, in the tunnels. Needlenose is a whiner but he’ll keep Dirge from bolting. Poor lug’s freaked. Needlenose asked around, talked to his buddies, and guess what? Sunstorm’s dead as well. A guard—Warpath, found his body in the tunnels.” 

Seven deactivations in one day. 

Splendid. Didn’t _that_ bode well for the post-war peace? 

Blast Off asked, “Did Prowl kill him?”

An expert smuggler of deadly weaponry and well-versed in identifying the patterns of damage inflicted by the weapons he purchased and proceeded to sell at inflated prices, Swindle shook his helm and waved a hand. “No. That ain’t it. Prowl shot Bombshell. There’s no bullet holes in Sunstorm’s frame. He was stabbed by a laser sword.”

“Arcee favors laser swords in a fight,” observed Onslaught.

“Spot on! And how did a certain idiot named Ratbat die? A sword to the chest. Mechs, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Arcee’s _gotta_ be the one who assassinated him.” 

“If she’s allied with Prowl, that explains his obvious cover story for it.”

“Dirge’s scared scrap ‘cuz of that.” Swindle confirmed. “He wouldn’t quit blabbing about how if Prowl realizes Dirge can give evidence that incriminates him, _he’ll_ be the next Decepticon prisoner that Arcee runs a sword through. He wants help.”

“Good call, Swindle, pocketing him out of sight where she can’t do that.” Blast Off turned his attention to Onslaught. His words were reluctant. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t help if it stops the Autobots from having their way. Dirge would owe us for it. We could hold that over his head.” His reluctance in regards to their ally became more pronounced. “But… Should we keep this to ourselves or pass this along? As a favor.”

“We agreed to protect Starscream from hostiles. Telling him every bit of intel we have on his new political berthmates isn’t a part of the transaction. There’s no call for forfeiting what could be an advantage.”

Swindle’s optics dimmed. “It might leak out anyway. The Autobots know Dirge’s missing. Starscream’s cozying up to them a bit _too_ much, he has a nose for finding dirty secrets to leverage.”

“Then should Starscream _ask_ , we heard this information at the same time he did and not a moment before.”

“Sure.”

“Right, sir.”

After extracting a (flimsy) promise from the jeep to keep them posted about the situation with Dirge, Swindle made himself scarce, eager to fill his depleted tanks after a shift sorting rubbish in the tunnels. Onslaught departed to wrangle Brawl and Vortex.

Blast Off was taking the long way around to their quarters when the noises of a kerfuffle at a side door that opened from Kimia’s barrel onto the street floated into his audials. Two cons were arguing with a beastformer.

A beastformer Blast Off recognized. 

One spat, “Traitor!”

“Are you spying for the Autobot-lovers?”

“Why should we let you waltz in and sight-see?”

“Get _out_. Go back to the other NAILs, unless you’re looking for a hammering.”

“Shove it out _your_ exhaust pipe.” Blue and white plating bristling, Sky-Byte was the portrait of muted aggravation. “I don’t want a fight. I was a Decepticon for a reason and I stopped being one for a _reason_. I’m not a spy! Wanting to talk to people ain’t about spying on them!”

The Decepticon’s engine gunned. 

“You sound like an Autobot. You wanna’ talk? How ‘bout my _fist_ has a good, long chat with your _face_?”

“In a fight between you and Sky-Byte, I’d place my shanix on Sky-Byte.” The two Decepticons startled and whirled to face Blast Off as he approached. With a shuttle’s height, Blast Off had greater mass in addition to rank on his side. He pointed down the corridor. “Scram. Go find something else to do.”

“Oh, is that so? Are you going to handle Sky-Byte yourself? I’m so grateful.”

“He’s a traitor—”

“We’re not the weak ones here. Sky-Byte ran. He ought to be taught a lesson.”

“I hate repeating a request. Leave. Or you’ll be the ones getting schooled in manners,” Blast Off said coolly. The threatening undercurrent made the two cons blocking the door decide harassing Sky-Byte wasn’t worth ire from somebody that outranked them. They staged a retreat. 

Standing out on the street, the sunlight showed Sky-Byte’s chassis was gleaming and as bare of a brand as it had been so long ago. 

“Blast Off.”

Blast Off was polite. “It’s been a while since we last met, Sky-Byte.” Though not as long as Sky-Byte might assume.

“It has,” Sky-Byte agreed. “Mind if I ask why you stepped in for me? Decepticons don’t have a reputation for doing things out of the goodness of their sparks.”

“Rejecting the Decepticon payroll doesn’t make you a traitor, merely a defector,” Blast Off deflected, not answering the question. He didn’t want to talk about why he had intervened. “But it _does_ mean you should steer clear of Decepticon strongholds. Why come here?”

“I just arrived today. Cybertron…—It isn’t dead anymore, but it isn’t what I expected.”

“Even resetting Vector Sigma couldn’t wipe away all our war did to the planet,” Blast Off mused. “Can planets hold grudges?”

“Could be. It attacked my ship when I was flying in, over the wastes,” Sky-Byte muttered. He rubbed his chin and pitched his volume louder. “I didn’t expect the set-up between the two sides either. No offense, don’t intend to pretend _otherwise_ , I don’t have much warm feelings for the Decepticons left. Not after what I’ve seen them do, them and the DJD. But what the Autobots are doing, it… It just doesn’t look good.” 

Ah.

“I take it that you’ve heard about the measures the Autobots have imposed to keep us in line.”

“The deterrence chips, for one thing,” Sky-Byte said. “Did you get fitted with one in there?”

Blast Off tapped the side of his helm in a wordless confirmation.

Sky-Byte’s face tightened.

“I’ve talked to the NAILs and the Autobots. I don’t know if I’m getting the full picture from them. The truth. An old—an old acquaintance of mine suggested I go and talk to some Decepticons. Have them hear me out, see how they view things like the chips and this peace. Swindle’s around, isn’t he? He was good at talking,” Sky-Byte jutted out his chin, defiant. “I _meant_ it when I said I don’t want to fight. I’m through with that.”

A brittle, embittered thought swam to the front of Blast Off’s processor. _Is millennia of violence something you can just switch off like a faucet once you’ve drunk your fill of it? Something you can just walk away from? Doesn’t it cling to you, Sky-Byte? The dirty work?_

And—

Cruelty was familiar. Blast Off _understood_ cruelty. Where it was coming from and what motivated it. He grasped why it could feel preversely good. Peace wasn’t familiar. Peace was something Blast Off could barely recognize anymore. He had a vague idea that peace was supposed to signify something beyond the absence of fighting, beyond a temporary truce, the lull between combat. It wasn’t just one side winning. It had... more than that built into it. 

What _precisely_ that something was, Blast Off couldn’t articulate in words. So he kept it to himself.

The thought remained unspoken. Blast Off swallowed it down, a stone in his intake.

It was the polite thing to do.

Sky-Byte wanted to talk to Swindle? Fine. Swindle wasn’t wedded to the lines between factions. He wouldn’t shoot Sky-Byte for wanting his spin on things. 

Unlike Brawl.

Blast Off turned away.

“Swindle’s inside, refueling. Wait here and I’ll bring him to you.”

**////**

(Blast Off’s most common cruelties had always been ones of omission. 

Cruelties of a failure to act, a failure to offer more than indifference. Turning a blind optic, knowing what was happening but looking away, stepping aside, saying nothing, not lifting a finger. Generating excuses. Caring, yes, Blast Off felt a tightening in his internals over it but not caring _enough_. Intervening only when it cost him little to do so. A slide down from where he had started. An indulgence of a bad habit. 

Blast Off had cared more about people who weren’t close to him, back at the start of the war. 

And the war had burnt him out on that. 

He retained the capacity. It was just that… 

Compassion for outsiders had become—distant. Wearier. It demanded energy Blast Off had to push himself to use, like trying to turn a rusted-up wheel. He had fallen out of practice. He had less to offer. He was more accustomed to drawing up his defenses tight around him like a suit of armor rather than lowering them.)

**////**

The deterrence chip’s removal was a weight lifted from Blast Off’s shoulders, though Soundwave and the others had already disabled it and rendered it harmless without alerting the Autobots after Horri-Bull had been executed. Blast Off hadn’t liked having a foreign object implanted in his helm. Who would? And it had rankled Blast Off to walk everywhere in public like a grounder and pretend that he couldn’t transform. 

It was a bigger relief that, with increased freedom, the Decepticons didn’t have to be confined to staying in Kimia’s barrel anymore.

The apartment in the city the Combaticons relocated to was shabby and the neutral who had built and owned the tower was as friendly as a spray of bomb shrapnel in the chest, but it hosted more than one room, it had functioning locks, and it had a cooking area and a set of washracks. It paled in comparison to the headquarters they had used before the war had started. But after the war Blast Off was disinclined to be picky.

It wasn’t a barracks, a crash site, or a starship. 

Good enough.

Blast Off stuck his helm through a doorway.

“Is Swindle still not answering his commlink?” 

Onslaught set the crate he’d carried through the front door onto the table in the common room with a _thunk_. “Yes. And the paranoid little cyberweasel is refusing to leave Kimia.” After Ironhide and Prowl had located Dirge’s hiding place in the tunnels and tried to arrest Needlenose and Sky-Byte in the incident that had been the catalyst to the chips’ removal, Swindle bolted and crawled into a hidey-hole somewhere. This was no shock. Swindle possessed a survival instinct normally found solely in prey techanimals in the wild. Dirge had copied him. Maybe Soundwave was sheltering them. Neither Soundwave nor Shockwave had joined the stream of Decepticons leaving Kimia. “ _Inconvenient_ , that’s what it is.”

The Combaticons’ material possessions added up to a large number of guns, two full crates, and what they carried in their subspaces. 

A wartime habit. Travel light, don’t carry anything too breakable.

Blast Off had the other crate under his arm. It contained Swindle’s belongings. When the Combaticons had been packing, Vortex hadn’t bothered with Swindle’s stuff and still sour over what Swindle had done to him on Earth, Brawl had ignored them. After Swindle’s failure to regroup with them in time for the move, Blast Off had packed Swindle’s belongings in his stead. 

Blast Off huffed. 

“Then what am I supposed to do with his stuff until he gets here?”

“Put it in the kitchen until I decide which of us is sharing a berthroom with him.”

**////**

A hole had opened in the wastelands. 

Blast Off estimated a modest-sized ship could be crammed through the opening and into the cavern below without scraping the sides. 

“Okay, what do we…—” Climbing out of it, followed by a dust-coated Blurr, Prowl trailed off before finishing the sentence as the Autobot absorbed the sight of the group clustering around the cavern’s rim. Oh, there were neutrals, thanks to Metalhawk (Sky-Byte and Metalhawk were the only ones that Blast Off’s database had recorded the names of), but most of them were Decepticons. Wildrider, Dead End, Brawl, Acid Storm, Razorclaw, and several others. And Starscream, front and center.

They had Prowl outnumbered.

“Damnit, Sideswipe,” Prowl settled on instead.

Starscream relished Prowl’s dismay. 

“I hope you don’t _mind_ —I invited some friends.”

Sideswipe, the Autobot who had been guarding the cavern before the group of Cybertronians had assembled on the site and he had been forced to comm Prowl for backup when they had refused to leave, scratched his helm at Prowl’s indignance. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t know what to do.” Sideswipe was at a loss. “They’re being… peaceable.”

Therefore the Autobot had no cause to shoot them.

Starscream’s smugness intensified.

“I figure these mechs all have a right to know the head of Autobot security is _hiding_ something from members of the Cybertronian government like myself and dear Metalhawk.”

Doors set at a rigid angle horizontal to the ground, Prowl switched his scowl from Sideswipe to Starscream. He scoffed, “Look—Starscream, thanks for this. _Thanks_ for putting all these ‘bots in danger.” 

Prowl jettisoned through a rant about objects quantum-jumping and unstable situations and could everybody _just back off_ and let him establish a perimeter so the citizens would be out of range if the underground danger wasn’t contained and something very bad happened. Starscream rose to the occasion. Metalhawk, with a grimace on his narrow features, broke away from the verbal sparring and walked over to Blurr. Prowl had identified Blurr as the person to discover the hole. Metalhawk might be verifying that.

Nobody obliged Prowl’s demands that they leave.

Brawl shouldered to the front of the group where Blast Off was. Absent-mindedly, Blast Off shuffled over to make room for him. Brawl’s engine throttled and Blast Off tracked Brawl’s angry glare. It was aimed at Prowl’s back.

< _Brawl, don’t you dare,_ > Blast Off warned him, catching onto the source of Brawl’s animosity.

< _That skidplate shot me on Earth! And mode-locked me! All I was doing was trying to_ kill _his flunkie! It hurts, getting stuck mid-transformation!_ >

Blast Off shut Brawl down.

< _Too bad. You have your orders. Don’t screw them up._ >

When Starscream had put a recruiting call to the Decepticons with the hook they would get to thumb their noses at Prowl and his scheming, Onslaught hadn’t come. But Onslaught had obligingly lent his support to the endeavor by dispatching Brawl and Blast Off to swell their numbers and telling them to shield Starscream if things turned violent.

Metalhawk and Blurr were talking. What they were saying was inaudible. Blurr’s field was taut with conflict, mouth crumpled with unhappiness. Prowl stomped away from Starscream and down into the cavern again. Despite Sideswipe intercepting him and waving his gun around to slow him down, Starscream soon elbowed Sideswipe out of his path and dove in after Prowl.

“Er,” Blurr said.

“Could you allow us to go after him?” Metalhawk suggested.

Blurr looked at Metalhawk, then Sideswipe, then at Metalhawk again. His optics darkened. Air whistled shrilly out of his shoulder vents. “I think this is information that shouldn’t rest only in the hands of Starscream and Prowl. Not about that thing down here. Sideswipe?”

Sideswipe seemed resigned to being overrun. “I didn’t hear Prowl give me orders to stop you, Blurr.” 

“Right! C’mon. Be-quick-about-it. Don’t-dawdle.” 

The racer sped over the rim and into the darkness as a blue smear of movement.

Inside the cavern, a city laid in decay. 

As a collector of antiques, Blast Off couldn’t resist admiring it a little in the privacy of his own processor. It must have been magnificent in its heyday. 

Spiralling roads led down to where the empty city had sunk, and twirled around spindly towers. Stone whorls decorated broken buildings, linked by roads that swooped and arched. Crystal windows reflected the glare from the passing grounders’ headlights. Their footsteps hollowly echoed off the cavern walls. In the deep levels, below the bridge the group was walking on, sickly clumps of pure white crystals had grown out of the strict patterns they had been once cultivated in and crawled up where they could. Steepled structures dotted with octagonal windows framed a barren boulevard leading up to an ancient hall.

There was an atmosphere more befitting a tomb to it now. 

The fanciful buildings were on the verge of collapsing. The crystal windows were broken. The silvery paint was worn away. Cracks webbed the stone. The elevated roads abruptly ended midair. 

The dorment Titan frozen inside the city didn’t make it any more welcoming of a place.

“Is that... Metroplex?” Somebody whispered.

“No, it’s Trypticon. You can tell by _his nonexistent giant tail_.” Somebody else squawked in the darkness. Probably Buzzsaw. “Anyway, the paintjob’s wrong for Metroplex. It’s a different Titan.”

“Wonder if it’s dead or not.”

“It’s not. They said it was dangerous. How is a dead Titan dangerous?”

“Who’s Trypticon?”

“That’d _better_ be a neutral asking, not a Decepticon. How out of the loop are you?” 

“Leave Tappet alone.” That had to be Metalhawk.

< _Why did Starscream have to run so far ahead? Slagger coulda’ make it less of a pain to bodyguard him._ > Brawl grumbled to Blast Off on the commlink. Their progress was neither swift nor direct. They caught up to where the Autobots had fashioned a mini-lab on site and Wheeljack had to point them in the direction Prowl and Starscream had gone. The road spiralled upward until it dropped off feet away from the Titan’s intimidatingly stern face, with the massive crag of a nose and the unsmiling mouth. That’s where Prowl and Starscream were.

The Titan woke up. 

Optics the size of cars gazed down at Starscream and proclaimed him a conqueror at a volume that vibrated through the empty city. Everybody heard.

A Chosen One. 

For a Titan to call Starscream the greatest among Cybertronians—that couldn’t be right. (Could Titans develop glitches?) The alt mode dash back to the surface upon learning of the ticking time bomb the Titan’s presence had inadvertently created—was something wrong with the Titan’s spacebridge?—to outspeed yet another explosion didn’t leave much time to think it over. 

The Titan was nowhere to be found afterwards, not in the cavern.

Watching Starscream carried into Iacon on the shoulders of celebrating masses, enjoying the windfall victory of a Decepticon being honored by a being as revered as a Titan instead of one of the Autobots, what many of the neutrals interpreted as a blessing from a sacred force, Blast Off made the mistake of not taking this development particularly seriously in regards to what it could do for Starscream’s rise to power.

**////**

The comm Swindle pinged into Blast Off’s inbox wasn’t an apology for going radio silent on the team, to Blast Off’s lack of surprise.

< _Can you drop off a bottle of engex at Alchemy-7? There’s nothing to do, I’m out of engex, none of the crew on this floor wants to buy the_ perfectly legitimate _download packs on turbofox rearing that I’m graciously offering to sell them at a discount, not even the ones that are_ actually _raising turbofoxes! And I can’t go outside._ >

Perfectly legitimate? Right. And Blast Off was a member of the Knights of Cybertron.

< _First, why are you at Alchemy-7? You’re a fugitive Decepticon. That’s a neutral ship._ >

< _They’re being paid to not turn me in._ >

< _And the Conehead?_ >

A fraction of a delay. Blast Off took note of it. He didn’t mention it. But he noted it.

< _He’s hiding here too._ >

< _You do know you can just hide in our apartment and therefore spare me this pestering from across the city to fetch you engex?_ >

< _The Autobots know I’m a Combaticon! The apartment was probably the one of the first spots they’d put under watch for me._ >

Not wrong.

< _Was Kimia’s barrel no longer sufficient shelter from them?_ >

The pause this time stretched on. 

<...>

< _Words, Swindle. If you please._ >

< _Shockwave’s in Kimia._ >

< _He’s been in Kimia for weeks. Why is this a problem for you now?_ >

< _Shockwave’s… I, well, you see. I made a mistake. It seemed like a swell idea at the time, what with how the winds of fortune were blowing. I got Dirge to spill the dirt on Prowl to Shockwave._ > Swindle hemmed and hawed nervously. < _But Shockwave decided the logical course of action after that was pulling moves like blowing up Omega Supreme. And stealing a time machine. That’s not what I had in mind. Help-wise. You have to believe me. Dirge didn’t want to get in over his head in hot oil either. So we got out. I’m not going be a part of Shockwave starting up the war again._ >

It was Blast Off’s turn to delay his response.

< _Which floor are you on?_ >

< _Twenty-third._ >

< _I’ll bring over engex, if you explain to me whom and what you and Dirge are mixed up with when I get there._ > It would make updating Onslaught about what Swindle was doing simpler.

< _Deal._ >

**////**

Megatron was back in custody.

Metalhawk was dead. 

Bumblebee was exiled and Prowl with him.

Starscream ruled Cybertron.

The cost was that Iacon had resumed the state it’d spent the majority of the war in. What the riots Megatron’s return ignited hadn’t wrecked, Superion and Devastator thrashing it out in the center of the downtown city had. Smoke hung about as an ashy shroud. People were still putting out the fires. Outside the ruins of the prison that had held Megatron before the rioters had invaded and broken him out of it, Blast Off located Swindle again. (Why couldn’t Swindle check his commlink more? Primus. Blast Off wasn’t Swindle’s goddamned protobatch initiator. He was tired, dirty, and he had better things to be doing.)

Swindle was sitting on the ground, shoulders drooping and staring down at his remaining hand in his lap. Propped up against the rubble beside Swindle and a blast mark engulfing his streamlined chassis, Blurr was holding out a dented arm and a few sparks were popping out as Quickmix checked his readouts. 

In the pale light of dawn, mechs were being loaded onto stretchers by medics or assisted in hobbling to the medbay by their helpers. Sprawled on a stretcher Jetfire offlined his optics and groaned, a nasty gash gouging into his side from torso to hip. The bare internals were visible. And leaking energon. Sky-Byte and Octane were pushing a heavily damaged Warpath in his alt mode out of the scorched hole where the blast doors had once been. 

Spotting Blast Off, Sky-Byte paused and gave him a quick wave. 

Blast Off nodded stiffly at him and continued towards his teammate.

“Swindle!” Blast Off called out, only to halt his approach when a neutral positioned himself between them and pointed a blaster at him. Swindle’s helm snapped up from his lap, glowing optics wide.

“I saw you as part of the mob, Decepticon,” Zetca said. “Are you going to cause a fuss over your side’s defeat?”

“No. The riot’s over,” Blast Off replied, looking down the blaster’s muzzle. “I’m here for my teammate, not for a pointless battle.”

Zetca looked over his shoulder at Swindle.

“He’s a friend. I know him, it’s fine,” Swindle called over to Zetca. Holstering his blaster, Zetca grunted and stepped aside. Blast Off forced himself to not toss Zetca a sneer when he strode past the neutral to where Swindle and Blurr were sitting. Quickmix unplugged his medical cable from Blurr’s port and moved onto his next patient.

“Onslaught said you’d be sitting the riot out in Alchemy-7. Why didn’t you?”

“Dirge had a terrible idea _and_ a sudden noble impulse, a dreadful combination. And against my better judgement, I went along with it,” Swindle said glumly. He was missing an arm, wires hanging from the empty socket, and his leg was mangled, outer plating torn away. His remaining hand opened and closed, joints speakily grinding. It didn’t sound like he’d oiled them in a while. He squinted at Blast Off. 

For once, Swindle seemed strangely uncertain. “So… Uh...”

“Yes?”

Swindle asked, “Why _are_ you _here_? I thought you’d already…— I thought you guys wouldn’t wait for me and just leave with Soundwave and the rest.”

“What are you talking about? We’re not going with Soundwave. We’re staying in Iacon. Vortex is too injured to travel far,” Blast Off replied. With a rotor, a foot, and his left leg below the knee joint destroyed after he’d ambushed the wrong Autobot and discovered the Autobot had back-up during the rioting, the helicopter wasn’t walking anywhere on his own. Onslaught had needed to give Vortex a ride to Flatline. And Onslaught, Brawl, and Vortex were still waiting in line. 

Mindful of Blurr listening in on the conversation, Blast Off added, < _Even if Vortex wasn’t immobilized, we wouldn’t leave. It’s time Starscream held up his end of our bargain._ >

Swindle reset his optics. “Oh. Got’cha.”

Blast Off glanced at Swindle’s chest. His visor flickered.

Like Sky-Byte’s chest, it was bare.

**////**

Brawl and Blast Off hung back. Stationed at a discreet distance, neither could make out what Starscream and Onslaught were saying to each other. The meeting had slid downhill from the first few minutes, after Onslaught had considerable trouble pinning Starscream down for the one-on-one meeting to begin with, and the two mechs had been arguing for an hour and a half.

At last Starscream seemed to run dry on patience and pointed at Onslaught’s chest. His body language took on an expectant air, the demand he was making clear to the two onlookers by the virtue of context. 

_Remove your brand, renounce your faction as everybody else in_ my _city has, and maybe I’ll reconsider what I’m saying_.

Onslaught’s response was just as clearly a negative. 

_No, why should I? We’ve already done our part. Pay up._

Cavalier, Starscream shrugged and turned his back on Onslaught. Blast Off mentally twitched and had to clamp down on his flare of silent offense on Onslaught’s behalf, scraping his hand down his mask. _That,_ when done to another Decepticon one was quarrelling with, no matter how elegantly, was a show of disrespect. A disparaging dismissal. 

Judging from the spike of controlled rage in Onslaught’s field, the insult had registered.

Starscream transformed and launched upward. 

Onslaught stood there without budging until Starscream was no longer visible in the sky, hands slowly curling into fists. With his back turned to them, his face was hidden from Blast Off. Then their leader stalked back to where Brawl and Blast Off waited.

“What was _that_ all about?” Brawl wanted to know. “Starscream—”

“Starscream,” Onslaught spat venomously through clenched denta and brushed straight past them, “has decided that since he had the backing of all the NAILs and since we sided with Megatron upon his return, he need not keep his word to associates with what he has termed bad publicity. He will not be persuaded otherwise. We’re _done here._ ”

**////**

Blurr’s bar was one of the buildings burned down during the fighting. 

It was also one of the first buildings to get volunteers lining up early to help rebuild it. After the hard work the racer had put into getting his business off the ground in the first place, Blurr loudly and publicly refused to call it quits and pack up at the setback he had been hit with. And a sizable number of the population in Iacon evidently regarded it as a minor calamity if they didn’t have somewhere with a working electrical system, a bartender, and comfortable seating in which to hang out and get plastered into a drunken stupor. 

What made Blast Off frown and take notice was that Swindle had joined the rebuilding volunteers.

And not just as a one-off thing. 

Swindle’s time roaming outside the Combaticons’ shared apartment was spent in the proximity of the bar, lending a hand, chattering, whittling the hours away with the other mechs who frequented the bar. Amidst the crowd, there was Squawktalk, Tankor, assorted neutrals, Dirge, and Octane. And Sky-Byte. Once or twice, Jazz, though that one didn’t linger long. A neutral produced a battered music box and songs would play through the day, undercut by the racket of hammers and welders in Maccadams’.

The Combaticons weren’t prohibited from stopping by, provided they followed Blurr’s rules for his establishment and didn’t cause trouble. They could and did visit the bar. Just not as often as Swindle. And the other Combaticons didn’t help with fixing it.

Blurr had saved Swindle’s life by pulling him out of the line of fire from the Decepticons, Blast Off gathered, and Swindle had repaid the favor by saving Blurr’s life in return and bodily dragging him and some other unconscious Autobots to safety. 

The jeep’s historical track record indicated that Swindle would leave it at that. 

He’d been indebted to Blurr. 

He had paid the debt off. The score was settled.

But Swindle _hadn’t_ left it at that. 

Blast Off was undecided on what to make of it. Team theories about the oddball interactions between Swindle and Blurr in Maccadams’ ran from Blurr being stricken with a case of sappy gratitude and convincing Swindle to stick around while Swindle played along (Blast Off was of the opinion this was unlikely—laying aside that Blast Off didn’t trust Blurr that much; before the war, Blurr had been a celebrity racer and a mech didn’t make it as a celebrity without learning the cutthroat rules to the game of reputation and ulterior motives) to Swindle trying to buy himself a slice of Blurr’s current good will with the neutrals now that he was claiming to be one himself to just being one of Swindle’s more mundane scams. 

Vortex said Swindle was after the free drinks. 

Brawl didn’t give a slag how many ex-Autobots Swindle hung around with and said so. Loudly. 

Onslaught listened and didn’t join in on the theorizing.

But Onslaught also didn’t tell Swindle to _stop_ what he was doing with Blurr so Blast Off took that as a signal that it was fine.

**////**

Iacon didn’t progress far in rebuilding under its ruler before it was trashed again. Before, it had been freak explosions and riots and rampaging combiners. Now, as if the universe wanted to switch the form of the latest crisis up as a ploy to keep them on their toes, it was death waves and Ammonite swarms and rampaging _Titans_. 

And Shockwave.

“It would be real nice if the universe would stay intact for longer than a week,” Swindle declared and coughed on smog. He shot at an Ammonite that had veered too close and made it flee.

Bullets whizzed overhead. Onslaught seized Blast Off by the elbow and yanked him to the side in time to avoid a second volley. Brawl grabbed another Ammonite and ripped it in half. Vital fluids were splattered in an oily mess across his helm.

Brawl wiped off his visor. He said, “Didn’t we go over this already with Galvatron and the empty universe?”

“It was the _dead_ universe, not the empty universe,” Blast Off corrected Brawl. 

Blast Off was streaked with soot and grime. Running through the destroyed streets, with Vortex hanging onto his back, and fighting off Ammonites had only become moderately less of a hassle after the end of Metroplex’s fight with the zombie Titan had signified no more miniature earthquakes would be generated by Titans clashing. 

Brawl flipped him off. “Big difference.”

“Big difference, little difference, why aren’t you running out of little green mechs to kill,” Vortex rasped deliriously in Blast Off’s audial. Getting his legs replaced by Flatline only to be infected by the plague from the death waves and shot several times while he was down was a string of bad luck. “What the frag. They’re as bad as Sweeps. Twerps. How many have you killed.”

“Death doesn’t seem to be sticking much lately,” Blast Off muttered in reply and sniped another Ammonite.

“HEY. Is that… ?” 

Brawl pointed up. And up. 

At a familiar combiner charging at Metroplex—who was clawing and scratching at the little green Ammonites carpeting him and burrowing into his internals, like the Titan had caught a rampant scraplet infection.

“Oh.”

“Whoa. It is.”

“Damn.”

Blast Off said flatly. “That’s Monstructor.”

In unison the other Combaticons turned to stare judgmentally at Onslaught.

Onslaught defended himself. “Pardon me. I wasn’t aware that Shockwave was plotting to cause an apocalypse and _kill everybody_ in the universe when I had Monstructor transferred to his laboratory! I happen to have a functioning sense of self-preservation!” 

In the distance, the giant green form of Devastator rose and commenced beating on Monstructor.

Monstructor shrieked.

“This is a lesson for future reference, Ons,” Vortex chirped sagely. “Don’t make a habit of sending completely deranged combiners into the hands of somebody who wants call time on the entire universe.“

**////**

The rest of the night, morning, and afternoon passed in a haze of laserfire and shouting and fire raining from the sky and events that were ridiculous even when graded by the high bar set by the past millennia. The Autobots and the Decepticons were forced to combine their forces to temporarily work together and overwhelm Shockwave. 

The universe was saved from collapsing.

In the milling chaos after battle, Blast Off’s helm spun and his visor was dimmed from vivid purple to dull mauve from exhaustion. The adrenaline rush he’d been riding since the zombie Titan had attacked was ebbing.

Shockwave had been swallowed by his own singularity, taking a chunk of Cybertron’s surface, the cavern the Titan had been in, and assorted corpses with him as his entourage to a crushing deactivation within a localized black hole.

Rodimus’ ship had reappeared, with a crew miraculously not shredded into a cloud of scattered atoms by its botched launch after all.

Bumblebee was deactivated. Megatron had defected from the Decepticons and joined the Autobots, their brand plastered on his front. Soundwave had vocally denounced Megatron for his betrayal and departed from Iacon’s ruins with his own splinter faction of Decepticons. The internal schism was… unsophisticated but predictable.

Optimus Prime had returned from exile. Prime was harping on about a trial. 

Starscream still ruled Cybertron. 

Iacon was in ruins. 

Again.

Parts of it remained, around where Metroplex had unfolded into city mode. The buildings had been blasted apart. Rectangular shells were still standing, suggesting they had once been a part of larger facilities, straight walls and corners jutting up. Metal slabs groaned and cracked under the weight they were being made to bear when mechs walked on them, parts breaking off and clattering to the ground with soft sounds. Giant footprints littered the landscape.

One such giant footstep marked the spot where a Titan had stepped on the apartment where the Combaticons had been living and flattered it like a pile of kindling during the fighting.

Lined up in the street, the Combaticons surveyed the smouldering mass of rubble that had been a tower.

“Alright,” Blast Off summed up. “We’re going to need to find somewhere else to stay tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to split this chapter in two and just post the first part because it was getting too long. Chapter notes can be found on my dreamwidth [account](https://trajectorion.dreamwidth.org/3840.html).


End file.
